The natural solution to this is to examine all of the existing rights-of-way that have been granted and tack on additional identical routes that can be purchased/auctioned at the municipal level.
This is merely a variation on the idea. In some cities (outside of USA) the government lays and owns conduits instead of actual cables in them. Each method has pros and cons (the main con of the conduit/right of way being drastic increase of up-front investment for the market players and thus drastic reduction of the number of potential competitors - anything smaller then mega-corps needs not apply - not to mention waste resulting from multiple parallel lines) but any case what is important is the overall concept: municipally controlled last mile.
Instead of just changing it back and allowing them to go back to having a monopoly, why not just start giving pieces of the company to those who they wronged?
Because that solution depends on another point of systemic failure: litigation.
A system whereby the municipality owns the last mile (or conduits etc) requires no constant regulatory supervision as long as all competitors are given equal access. A system dependent on forcing an unwilling company, in whose best interest is to thwart all your attempts at forcing them to do this, requires constant monitoring, constant regulatory loophole fixing and as the final result endless litigation, all to questionable effects as all these measures are reactive and do not take effect for years after the harm to consumers was done.
One solution is simple, effective and has a few easily observable points where it could possibly go astray, the other is complex and depends on endless litigation and political maneuvering as primary mechanisms of control.
The only reason to prefer the complex, unwieldy and unreliable over simple and effective is ideological zealotry.
The telcos were actually forced to sell access to their lines at cost, but now they aren't. Or so I understand (FWIW.)
I don't see why this isn't an acceptable solution.
Because it does not work. The whole idea is fundamentally silly, as the telco's "competitors" are forced to buy service from their main competitor. It leads to a situation where the dominant telco is able to pretend that it is selling access "at cost", while in fact obstructing those buying in many different ways, such as creating delays, purposeful technological incompatibilities and what not. In all the marketplaces in which it was tried the dominant telco always won resulting in these "competitors" withdrawing or... irony... being bought at bankruptcy prices by that very telco.
Cable television is a perfect example of one of the fatal flaws in the dog-eat-dog capitalism models of the Chicago School of economics, so beloved by various Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists etc. It is an illustration of a rather obvious real-world property of the so-called "free market" which, contrary to carefully fudged "models", allows for (and in fact inevitably leads to) formation of large industry/geography-specific monopolies, even without any governmental interference whatsoever.
That is so simply because in the real world, unlike on paper, there are a number of physical, geographical, technological and other conditions which lead to an automatic formation of unsurmountable barriers to entry for competitors, especially after a local market consolidation by one market player. In this particular case it is simply the physical limitation of the cables themselves: no community can allow for 20 companies to dig up every road every which way to lay cables to any and all houses in that community, not to mention the fact that the upfront cost reduces the number of viable competitors to a mere handful nationally to begin with.
And in this particular case the only entity which can restore competition (and thus "free market") is... the government. Municipally owned last mile cabling/fiber, bandwidth of which is then rented to any number of competitors who compete for the customers based on their service and price is of course the only sane way to deal with this. But it contradicts the Holy Theory Of Ultimate Greed which proclaims that everything in this world must be owned by some mogul, and therefore it will never come to be, at least in USA. A future of regional communication monopolies getting away with murder is the only alternative really, regardless how many silly lawsuits are filed. The only choice remaining under such market "freedom" being as to which one of the 3 or 4 mega-corporations will be given a strangle-hold on what community.
It the future, as the perceived value of intellectual property grows it is bound to receive ever more legal protection, possibly even more than the tangible (clay and metal) kind.
I am not so sure about that. As things are presently, this whole make-believe world of imaginary property is about to receive a rather substantial non-imaginary kick in its balls from the rather material rest of the economy. It will make all the other "bursting economic bubbles" look something out of your soap tray. Hold on to your (imaginary or otherwise) hats, for it is going to be one hell of a ride.
Which is actually our luck, in the long term, because the only way in which the imaginary property can receive "more legal protections.. then the tangible kind" is in a wholly totalitarian state where all information transmissions are inspected for subversive content. I for one will willingly go there.
This "imaginary" property generates very real tax income.
So do casinos, astrologists and various legalized Ponzi schemes.
Welcome to the Grown-up world.
Your point? That foolish people will part with real money in exchange for nothing? That has been going on the "grown-up world" for millenia, ever since the first priest donned his robes.
These have a "retail value": the price of a commercial license.
Which, in the eyes of the corporatists. makes all those non-permissive licenses part of "their" team and thus protected. They only despise the "commies" who seek no monetary profit and so they write laws to make sure that their ideological warfare does not result in some undesired side effects, such as some CEO having to face criminal charges for using the "hippie stuff" for gain.
So giving away free software against the copyright agreement after it's been released will never be criminal, but using free software in something that is for profit is.
To defeat which argument the corporates will argue that they are charging only for the "service" of "giving away" the software, i.e. you pay for delivery not contents. And in effect they would be right, since they could not put a new copyright on such work, only to sell it as is. My point stands.
I fully realize that this still does not defeat the civil liabilities but the point of the law is to purposefully protect corporates (CEOs particularly) against criminal proceedings, no matter what they do with FOSS software and Creative Commons stuff. They wrote the law and it would be silly for them not to install escape hatches in it for themselves. Civil liabilities are merely the stock of their trade: money. Criminal ones would mean some CEO going to jail and they will not have that in the laws they purchase.
Also, I forgot to add, that the "value over $1000" has another insidious purpose: to exclude copyright infringement by corporations on Creative Commons or FOSS work. The idea is for the corporate lawyers (who in effect wrote the law) to claim that the "nerdy bearded weirdo" in that basement gave the stuff away for free, thus it was only natural for a respectable, upstanding corporation to take his stuff and put it to "good use" for profit. This is in essence the same argument that was used by colonialists everywhere, that the natives were "not using properly" (i.e. up to the invaders' standards) their land, oil and what not.
Which of course makes all copyright infringement into criminal infringement as no copyright holder is ever going to claim less then hundreds of thousands to millions in "losses" per piece of data shared. You see, 1000 million bazillion downloads could have occurred (yes, yes every man, woman and child and their pet parrot could have purchased the thing many times - and soon that will be the only option with "pay-to-read"!) thus depriving the poor copyright holder of a veritable mountains of cash.
That has been the standard "reasoning" in all copyright infringement cases and is unlikely to change. In fact that is the very reason why the clause of "value over $1000" was put in as the writers of the law set it to make sure that every single case qualified. Welcome to lobbyist law writing 101.
How can you own your name? Your social security number? Your identiy?
I cannot. There can be a person anywhere in the world who could (without even knowing of my existence) change his name to what mine is. I have no means of stopping him. Similarly, something on the order of 20% the Chinese are named Wong (which means King in Chinese).
Let me fill you in on something sparky. Ownership IS a completely legal construct.
Yes it is, but it is based on a particular physical aspect of the things being "owned": their ability to occupy only one spot of space-time continuum at a time. That is why land can be owned but information cannot. That is also why scarcity is an elemental component of all laws of "ownership", and thus a foundation of Capitalism. Remove scarcity and you are also removing "ownership" as a meaningful concept as supply becomes infinite.
Society has decided that you can own land and society has decided you can own what you write. Be it a book or a program. You don't really own it you are granted a license for a limited time at which point it enters the public domain.
See above. "Society" (a bunch of lobbyist-bribed politicos to be exact) can "decide" whatever it wants, and it will not change the fundamental nature of things. "Society" can decide that the force of gravity is "illegal" and demand, by law, that everyone floats of their own accord. The force of gravity will simply ignore the wish of the "society" and proceed to keep us firmly grounded.
You and other copyright ideologues are simply raging against one of the fundamental properties of the Universe. Nothing personal, but in this wee fight my money are firmly on the Universe prevailing, no matter how many lawyers and politicians you get into your corner.
But yes all of your noise and it really is just noise is flailing around trying to justify pirating stuff. Your tamping out greed is the worst hypocrisy since you want to keep your personal wealth while taking the fruits of others work.
What I do or do not, has no bearing on the logic of the argument. That is the way with science. It does not matter of the man writing 2+2=4 is an acclaimed hero, a celebrity, White, Black, Gay, a priest, a thief, a rapist or a bona-fide Fascist. The equation remains true regardless.
An author has a right to set the conditions of how his work is used and distributed for specific period of time.
Says the "author". The Universe remains unmoved and the sequence of numbers which is the "authors" claim is not only uncontrollable by him, it is also obtainable by others without ever coming in contact with the "author's" "work".
Example: the "author" says that his "composition" of digits "412" is now "his" and no one else can use it without his pemisison. I roll dice 3 times and get the same numbers, never hearing of the "author". In accordance with your inane laws, I am a criminal, for having dared to take advantage of the fact that the numerical sequence exists outside the scope of space-time continuum. Etc and so on.
But your little game of logical twister is just silly. Just as I can own a piece of land, the fruit that a tree that I plant on that land, and the home on that land I can own a program, book, or poem that I write.
Some of these things are not like the others...
But I get the gist of your argument, it is simply "My greed is bigger then your science!"
Why do you say it's impossible, that's the whole point behind backwards compatibility which is why we continue to use backwards technology developed decades ago. And if any piece of software is popular enough it will be cloned, emulated, or somehow still kept around. And with online capability more and more software is being deployed as an online service - plenty of web apps out there.
Because that is how it is playing out in practice. Emulators have a lot of drawbacks and maintaining backwards compatibility with earlier, woefully flawed designs is only producing more problems: see also security situation under Windows.
As to web apps, you are defeating your own arguments. The web browsers, their protocols and rendering schemes have changed many times in the period of the last 5 years alone. Most web apps developed just 5 years back would fail to run on today's editions of web browsers.
Go search through sourceforge, there's plenty of OS independent and Windows XP software on there.
Much of the "OS independent" stuff are scripts and the like, many of which require POSIX compliance levels not available under Windows (i.e. they require whole UNIX compatible environments of the likes of Cygwin - which is really defeating the whole point). Look, I have been doing FOSS for a very long time and I speak simply from experience as I was asked more then once to try to deploy some FOSS apps on Windows. Even the ones which claim to run on Windows, rarely do, as they are not actively maintained on that platform. It is just the way things are.
No, there are plenty of free tools for programming windows in pretty much any language.
All of which suffer from lack of integration with the platform. That is why most non-trivial project authors who are desperate for a Windows port use Microsoft's own tools.
Hardware is far more closed than software, yet you seem to dismiss that because the crusade against Microsoft
This is getting ludicrous. I will not rehash the whole sordid history of Microsoft's APIs and the rest of the crap that is going on in Windows. Go educate yourself.
I agree, they earn millions because they do their job and make money for stockholders. Science and technology advancement has nothing to do with it.
LOL. Your uncritical hero worship and wholesale swallowing of the propaganda is amusing. Most if not all of these companies wouldn't even notice if the CEO was hit by a bus and did not show up to work for years. As a matter of fact some of the most highly paid CEOs historically are the ones who presided over their company's collapse or a radical downsizing of revenues.
All the pure zealots may have taken their ball and gone home, those who actually care about providing software to children in developing nations are still working on the project.
You mean the ones on Microsoft's payroll? Some "caring".
People are still working on Sugar, and developing Linux apps, as well as people working on XP apps.
Sugar is for all intents and purposes dead as far as OLPC is concerned. The only apps that will be worked on are the XP ones and means of integration of commercial "adware" and "crippleware" into the XP image.
When you have a fixed platform it's easy to strip things down, just as Microsoft stripped down Windows to work on the Xbox. Many do-it-yourself types have been running stripped down XP on EEE PC and other low cost ultra portables.
Xbox is a single-purpose, single-class of applications running platform. It is worlds apart from what the supposed goals of the OLPC are. But then you are probably right, Microsoft has likely envisioned an "OLPC Xbox", full of commercial "crippleware" with a complete DRM lockdown and 100% of contents controlled by Microsoft a
Very there is only one. How many books of the same quality exist?
There are thousands of variants of Homer's Iliad alone (as each translator/transcriber added his own alterations). In fact we do not even know that Homer was the one who wrote it originally.
And yes Homer got paid for it. And paid very well.
Given that he was very possibly just an embellisher of a previous text, that would make him a crook, no? Also you exposed yourself as a complete liar, which destroys your credibility on other issues, by claiming that "he got paid for it". No such data is available to historians. You just made shit up to make yourself look more assertive and picked the wrong dude to try this crap on. But I guess this is par for the course with the defenders of copyright laws.
The rest is still justification of you wanting free stuff and pretending you have some right to it.
Lies. I gave you mathematical (as in scientific) demonstration which obliterates your entire bullshit line of reasoning. You responded with hot air in the vain of "I can't hear you over the noise of my greedy entitlement to stuff being so awesome!".
Which again, is par for the course. When faced with undebatable logic, your kind will always resort to screams of "But we made a law against it! See! See!".
If you don't like the conditions of the copyright then don't use the material.
If you are right there will be no need for you to to use anything but free software, music, and books.
Any other action and you are taking away the author rights.
All of which is utterly irrelevant for this simple reason: you cannot take information. It is impossible due the nature of information itself. If you disagree, demonstrate a way in which I can "take" the integer number 1 from someone. Or any other integer number or a sequence of thereof. This is not a realm of some make-believe bullshit based on your desire to own crap, it is the realm of hard science. If you want to own information, you must first demonstrate that information can be owned.
Sorry but good software is scarce. How many really good Operating systems are out there? Not that many. How many programs as good as Photoshop, Autocad, or even Office?
Dang few.
The talent and work to make programs of that quality is scarce. Yes once they are made it is easy to reproduce them. But the same is true about books and has been true about books for around 200 years!
The flaw in your argument is that you forgot to take into account the fact that software and books, like all information, are in essence immortal. Thus it is possible to build any software, to any level of quality, given only few volunteers over long enough period of time (the volunteer's grand-grand-children can work on it just as well as the original authors). As the GP pointed out quite correctly, information does not obey the same rules as physical goods and therefore there is no "scarcity" possible of... integer numbers. Which all information is equivalent to (amongst many other possible transforms). Ever hear of someone running out of the integer number 4? Number 7? 8?
Also look at your own example: books. How scarce is Homer's Iliad? What was the last time Homer got paid for it? Did he ever?
So cut out this subterfuge. You think because it is easy to copy that you have a right to free stuff no matter what.
This has nothing to do with "ease of copying". But it has everything to do with fundamental properties of information and the attempts by some greed blinded people to apply rules of Capitalism to something which cannot be owned (for not having the necessary attributes for it) and thus cannot be traded.
This is turning into an exchange of whole goddamn essays, for which I really have no time.
Why do applications need to be constantly updated and fixed?
Because they cease to interoperate correctly with the rest of the changing software ecosystem. If you manage to stop everyone from changing anything anywhere, and keep your hardware from failing, than you can keep all your software (assuming no crippling bugs are present) unchanged indefinitely. In real life this is an impossibility. This of course has been the engine behind the untold billions raked in by the software industry for dubious "upgrades" and, as such a defender of the Free Market Way, I would think you would be among its adoring cheerleaders. Creating "value" out of thin air and all that...
Also Windows freeware can in fact be open source
Which is a rarity.
Again, for the most part the debate is moot because most teachers don't have the knowledge or will to dig around in code, and good closed source software encourages FOSS developers to make clones.
Not for projects such as this u-turned OLPC. Ideological incompatibility.
I disagree, often you will see projects for both Linux and Windows because developers just can't ignore the popularity of the Windows platform - Open Office, GIMP, Firefox, etc.
You got a curious definition of "often". These are the few FOSS projects with either corporate sponsors interested in paying for expanding into Windows land, or projects with huge user bases, so huge that some their users who are forced (for whatever reasons) to use Windows have finally become so desperate as to do some porting. Statistically, these represent less then 10% of all FOSS projects, although their user base is large. If you take some list of Linux software, say the 60 thousand plus of Debian packages, you will find that less then 500 have Windows ports and these are usually cross-platform development libraries and the like. Part of the problem is of course that in order for FOSS to work on Windows, the developers must purchase both Windows and Visual Studio or some similar toolchain, which goes against of the whole idea of Free Software and is barely tolerated by many of the Open Source people (due to cost and other factors).
Technology advances faster than society. Windows may have slowed the adoption from a technical perspective, but it accelerated the adoption of computers socially.
You gotta be kidding. Microsoft had a strictly parasitic relationship with the adoption of computers socially. What made it possible was the advancement of micro-electronics, without which the whole point of a "personal computer" would be moot. Most, if not all, ideas employed in Microsoft software are (poor) re-implementations of what went on in Computer Science decades before. If it were not for the fatal error IBM has made in its deal with Microsoft, no one would have heard of Bill Gates today. Please stop with this insane attribution of wholly undeserved merits to Microsoft.
It reminds of all these people who attempt to justify multi-billion salaries of CEOs by painting them as somehow "responsible" for advancement of technology or science, as if there are not thousands of equally (or more) talented people waiting to take their place should the "irreplaceable hero" get hit by the bus.
... it's just people want backwards compatibility and familiarity...
LOL. That's rich. OS/2 was doomed not because it was "not compatible" (IBM went to great pains to make sure it was - following which Microsoft changed their APIs to break that) or "familiar" (like Win 95 resembled Windows 3.1, or Win 3.1 resembled DOS, right? Right?) but because Microsoft engaged in this wee little plot involving taking all the PC manufacturers hostage, leaving IBM as the only seller of preloaded with it
You create a false dichotomy, closed source vs education. The barrier only exists in a small context which is people trying to learn about programming. Software is a tool, most people don't care about the code, they care about the interaction and results. Just as most programmers could care less about the process used to create computer chips, only a small minority of students are interested in digging around code.
You are missing the point entirely. The issue is not "digging around code" by the kids (although that is a bonus) but maintainability. According to your own words you now expect piles of haphazard "freeware" to be used as the mainstay of the tools used on such laptops, with no system of assuring that these programs get updated, fixed or otherwise kept up. FOSS is the only remedy (other then fully commercial solutions) in any organized long-term educational effort. You are attempting to pretend that the pay-to-play system, as it functions in wealthy nations, will somehow be magically replicated via freeware with no side effects. In case of FOSS it is frequently the teachers who mess with the educational software (as much of it is intentionally written using simplistic scripting languages) and there is no risk of built-in obsolescence. Closed-source "Freeware" on the other hand is rather famous for being utterly crappy in this department and its life cycle is probably the shortest of all the types of software available.
You seem to think there are people who write Windows and people who write Linux applications, when many times those populations overlap. I will agree the signal-to-noise ratio of good and bad software for Windows is worse, but that's because it's the easiest platform to develop.
You seem to think that motivations and ideologies do not matter. Free Software is a magnet for people who are willing to contribute something to society but who are adamant that their contributions will not be simply re-packaged by some jackal and sold for profit. A vast majority of volunteers seems to share this outlook. That is why with the advent Free Software most people who would have otherwise created "freeware" for Windows have long since departed that realm for ideologically compatible ground: Linux. The pool of quality "freeware" Windows programmers is these days really, really shallow, despite of that platform's commercial popularity. "Adware", "Crippleware", "Malware" makers on the other hand are attracted primarily to Windows seeking to satisfy that which motivates them: need for profits.
Yes, and diversity has it's problems. Or do you not remember the days when programs were written for DOS, Apple, XT, Tandy. There are pluses and minuses to having different operating systems roaming around. By installing the most popular OS doesn't mean you are locking out every other one. Those interested in something different can easily change.
That just is not true. If the "most popular" system commands 20% of the marketplace, there is no problem. If it commands 95%, forcing 90% of all other software to be written for that platform and if that system is also a property of a singular US corporation, you not only got "a problem" it is a gigantic problem. Windows is single-handedly responsible of throwing the whole of the Computer Science back nearly by an entire generation. Technologies popular at the end of 1960s (like virtualization) are only now becoming available for the Wintel platform. That is 40 years later!
Problems brought on by diversity are on a whole different scale from those brought by monopolistic mono-culture.
There's a big difference between a military invasion, and putting a McDonald's in Russia where people in fact did line up to get little piece of America.
Yes, right up until the true meaning of the IMF "reforms" hit them. I guarantee you the feeling is much different now after they have realized what McDonalds
I think our major difference lies in our expectation of the project. My understanding from the beginning was this was aimed towards developing countries that had the resources to provide education services, but did not have the resources for full computers. Places like Philippines, Brazil, Thailand etc. where people live in relative poverty, but have access to water and shelter. Such places don't have reliable power (hence the hand crank), and the cost for a laptop is expensive. Here is where I think the difference can be greatest, because those nations are connected, and creativity with computers can be shared and will allow them greater economic opportunities.
The talk was of remote tribal areas and of languages which traditionally have not seen any sort of computing applied to before. That is why there was a big hoopla about the XO's keyboard and its ability to be configured to weird languages (an artifact of which is that all the keys can be remapped in weirdest ways) and unheard of input methods. This alone tells you that the XO was indeed supposedly targeted at those who do not have the traditional access to education. Perhaps that was idealistic and impractical but it was a major part of the appeal and uniqueness of the project which drew in contributors.
Why does it have to be FOSS? There are people who write closed source for free.
Because not only is their number a fraction of those who contribute to FOSS, but the whole idea of closed source is an anathema to the supposed goals of such a project: education. If you were discussing a project whose aim was to distribute as many variants of solitaire or "trainers" for commercial games as humanely possible throughout the world, or pointless "utilities", the situation would be different. That is where the vast bulk of "freeware" on Windows is. The rest of the "freeware" is in fact "adware" or "crippleware". Attempts at giving away the "first hit" in efforts to hook the user and make him pay for the "full version".
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason still results in doing the right thing. If the countries adopt XP as the primary platform and develop economically, what is the problem. They are still better off economically and in terms of education.
As slaves of the US corporate "culture" you mean? Ever heard of "diversity"? Probably not. Getting wealthier at any cost is a very short-sighted way of thinking which has lead to untold disasters in the past. Also, it is the ultimate hubris and arrogance to think that everyone wants mini-Americas everywhere. This is the "thought" that drove the PNAC cabal with Bush in front to invade Iraq. Apparently there was an American, desperate to burst out of, in every Iraqi, or some such.
But skipping the wider geo-political implications of the Microsoftization of the Universe, the main point of this discussion was that OLPC was supposed to be different, billed itself as being different and attracted supporters on the basis of being different. Remove that and the whole point of the OLPC project disappears. Any old "charity" can refurbish old laptops (most of which are way more powerful then the XO) and ship them bulk to the places you mentioned.
The excitement for XO may have taken a hit, but the excitement for a low cost, low power platform has not. Just because Negroponte lost focus with his specific project, doesn't mean somebody else isn't trying to pick up it up.
You mean the demand is still there, but from now on it will be only fulfilled in the easiest and most juicy (from the perspective of potential commercially strategic gains) areas. That means that the OPLC has lost its edge and the real attack will come from the likes of ASUS who soon be able to achieve the prices those wealthiest of poor nations can afford. And software piracy will take care of the rest, which ironically will result in firmly putting Microsoft in the dri
I believe the target audience isn't what you think. It was not intended for the poorest of the poor, but rather targetted at countries where the people have basic necessities but need a low cost
computer to bridge the technical gap. Places like Uraguay, Nigeria, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil. No they don't speak English, but they also do not speak "tribal" languages.
Not according to the original project evangelizing done by Negroponte. The audiences you describe do not need a specialized OLPC laptop at all, they would be much better served by refurbished and much more powerful laptops, which then can indeed run Windows and all the other jazz. OLPC's XO laptop made sense only if it were targeted at the kids in the tribal and impoverished areas. That is why there was talk during the original design process about hand-cranked generators and what not.
Maybe this will come as a shock, but there is plenty of freeware written for Windows systems, and not everything is as bloated as Microsoft Applications.
But is the source of it accessible? Freeware does not mean FOSS, especially on Windows. If not, the point is moot, the "freeware" is a single-language (most likely English) wonder which cannot be deployed even to the places you listed as none of them are English speaking.
Having visited a few of these countries I can say the "sneaker net" vector of getting applications is alive and well. You don't need high speed internet, you just need to stop by the mall, or marketplace stalls.
I am sure Steve Ballmer will be pleased. And the OLPC version of Windows will therefore come with no DRM....
I don't see how Linux is the only way "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves."
It is, given the original project parameters. If you change the parameters drastically then of course the solution will change as well...
You act like once an OS is on there it's impossible to remove. Including XP was a reaction to the demands of customers (typically governments), not some underhanded conspiracy.
Err.. the governments in question are famous for being, for all intents and purposes, hives of villainous corruption and conspiracies. Add Microsoft into the mix...
As to removing XP, sure (assuming no nasty DRM will be put into the boot-loader - which actually was the case with Linux - yes I know, nuts, but that's Negroponte for ya) what is the point of going through the whole rigmarole then?
What excites me about the OLPC project is not what it ships with, but that as a platform it has excited numerous developers in both the commercial and open source communities
That "excitement" took a huge hit, as evidenced right here at Slashdot, particularly amongst those who were the most prone to write stuff for the XO, after the Negroponte's u-turn.
Anybody who thought the project would be the end-all to the computing needs of the developing world is a blind idealist.
Perheaps, but then a number one no-no for a project such as this is to pull stunts of the kind Negroponte just did. Alienating your most fervent supporters and replacing them with a multi-national corporation with decidedly questionable motives is not something that bodes well for the future of the project. Just from the good will and political stand points alone (which is critical for a project of this nature).
What it has done is identified a market and motivated hardware and software developers to address.
Fallacy #1: there is no "market". Unless by "market" you mean kids using free software who will never pay a dime for it. That is why FOSS was essential to this, no one else will, barring multi-million g
The ones who see computers as a tool want easy access to software that meets their needs, in many cases that means software written for Windows - which can easily and cheaply be acquired in the "underground" market.
You are working with a Western-centric point of view, disregarding the fact that many (if not most) of the target (as per original project goals) kids do not speak English and require all their software to be localized in some tribal language, some of which have barely a written alphabet. When you take this into account, the whole logic of "easy access" to software falls apart (and that is irrespective of the fact that many of the places the XO laptops were supposedly meant for do not have any access to communication facilities and thus any access, easy or otherwise, to any additional software not already on the laptop. That is why, amongst the original, now quite forgotten, goals of the project was to cram as much of different kinds of software as possible the limited storage capacity. Linux was perfectly suited for that given the near complete coverage of the whole spectrum of possible applications in a relatively (compared to other systems) very small space. And ease of localization... and a million of other reasons.
Then of course is the cost of that "easy" accessible software. Windows on its own is useless and only becomes useful with the whole software ecosystem of dominant on the platform applications, each and every one of which exceeds the cost of the entire XO laptop many-fold! And then there is speed and storage, XO not being designed to run a full-fledged Office or Visual Studio... and on and on and on.
Look, I am not going to go over this ad-nauseum for the millionth time. Go look at the many prior Slashdot discussions about the OLPC project.
Most people I grew up with who work with Linux and program professionally used DOS and Windows when they were younger. Personally I used Apple when I was young, DOS and OS/2 in my teens, Windows in college... it didn't matter what OS I'm running, it's all about the applications.
Again, you are having difficulties disassociating yourself from your personal experiences and the Western outlook on things. You also conveniently forget that during the DOS and early Windows days one of the main vectors of "learning" by kids was... rampant piracy. I personally have nothing against it, as I am an opponent of the whole Intellectual Property nonsense, but if this method is not going to be a) tolerated in a Microsoft controlled (no matter what Negroponte says) project, and b) it is no longer viable without high speed internet connections, given the monstrous size of these applications (never you mind that XO will never be able to run them).
In essence Linux (or perheaps BSD or some such) was the only method by which the project goals, as originally stated, could have been achieved. That is why I said what I said. This has nothing to do with my dislike of Microsoft and its tactics, but is simply a result of logical analysis of the requirements versus what XP is bringing to the table. My reaction would have been similar with Mac OSX. These systems are simply not fit for the task, when you take the whole of the picture into account.
So by using XP, Negroponte has essentially abandoned the original goals of the project and re-shaped it to be very narrowly applicable only to Western language speaking centers of former colonies with a relatively well developed communication and societal infrastructure, and even then I have no clue what is he planning to do with the woefully inadequate power of the XO in this new role for which it was not designed. This and also the rest of whole host of new problems brought on board along with XP.
It was a very disappointing move and a wholesale betrayal of all those people who he was so busy convincing with his previous set of goals. If you ad
If you call for help, you'll get lots of unwanted attention and a lifetime stigma. All your friends will know just what you did, and ostracize you; even if they personally have no problem with it, they'll have to go through the motions to satisfy their parents. Not that it really matters, since you'll be taken into custody by Social Services and have to move. Oh, and since all the money is going towards paying my lawyer, and you can't get more since you'll be watched around the clock, forget getting an education.
Yes, of course, naturally, undoubtedly, a hooker going to public places in stilettos and 3 inch long skirts is really concerned, I mean, first and foremost, about what the parents of her friends would think! And obviously, naturally, logically, she is also going to go to college, paid fully by her Mom, and thus is most concerned about... being held hostage by the funding of her future education!
You gotta be kidding me...
Your attempt for argument from ridicule fails to do much more than make you seem like an idiot.
In the light of the above I am not sure who looks more like an idiot.
This, of course, is very different from you concluding all this from the fact that the grand-grand-parent disagrees with you.
I simply point out possibilities (with a large degree of probability, based on other factors in the story) which are automatically dismissed out of hand by the "Think of the Children" Flaming Pinhead Crusaders, as these possibilities are a great obstacle to their attempts at justification of their merry witch-hunts.
Which is it, we cannot tell with any degree of certainty from some newspaper blurb by some witch-hunter sympathetic jurno. Which is pretty much all of them - one of the effects of fascist tactics is that all journalists are afraid to appear in any way not "in tune" with the Holy Inquisition for fear of reprisals. Just as all the journalists were scared shit-less not to appear "unpatriotic" when another group of fascists were busy drumming up a conquest of a foreign country for profit. Same mentality and curiously a very overlapping cross-section of fascists in both camps.
Besides, a 12-yeard old is too young to be a grocery store clerk either.
Not in many, many countries around the world. Odds are your shoes or your shirt were made by a 12-year old.
You do realize that there is quite a bit of difference between a prostitution ring run by its members/workers, and one run by people who have power over them ?
As it was pointed out by me repeatedly, "power over them" does not translate to merely talking them into doing things. Threats of violence? Yes. Chit-chat... err... no!
All these screwed up Holier Then Thou Defenders of Questionable Virtue would like it to be every which way they want to have it: its abuse if the kid gets beaten into it, its "abuse" if he gets talked into it, its "abuse" if he comes onto someone, its "abuse" if he talks himself into it! It is always some "abuse" somewhere by someone with them! If no "abusers" are to be found anywhere... then, fuck, the kid abused himself! Put him into the slammer! Which is what they do! "Child Protectors" my ass. More like protectors of the Glorious Inerrant Ideology Which Makes Them Feel So Pompously Important (and the price be damned).
Of course none of this has to do with any real abuse (which is based on threats of violence and where the abuser always attempts to maintain secrecy). It has everything to do however with their totally messed up, hypocritical, paranoid, delusional attitudes to sex or anything even remotely resembling sex. This sex-related idiocy permeates every aspect of Judeo-Christian religions, it extends way beyond anything to do with children an
Also, beyond your anger toward MS, there's no content in your posts on this topic.
Anger? Since when mentioning the obvious logical implications is now called "anger"? You ascribing your emotions to me.
You claim that the OLPC is incapable of educating children because MS is providing the OS. I, in turn, suggest you wait and see how it turns out.
So far the OLPC hasn't produced much of anything very useful in the field, Windows or Linux notwithstanding, admittedly because the task is very difficult and the project young. With Windows their job just got harder by an order of magnitude and again, I shall not rehash the many, many reasons why, you can look up all the other Slashdot discussions on this.
Subsequently, judging by past performance and all the other factors involved, my bet is firmly on the "Epic Fail" outcome.
There is an enormous glut of Windows based freeware out there specifically tailored to the needs of children, many of which go above and beyond any Linux based edutainment package (and WAY more kid friendly)
Then the OLPC project, as a whole, is pointless, right? You can't have it both ways, you know. Either there is an "enormous glut" of "free" "educational" software for Windows out there, that is useful out of the box for the application (i.e. localized in 20+ languages, including Swahili) in which case OLPC is moot as we can just ship it on all those Windows laptops presently headed for the garbage bin at the fraction of the cost, or the OLPC is needed to make custom-tailored software for this platform in accordance with the original OLPC project mission, in which case there is no free software for XP presently available suitable for this task and it has to be written from scratch (or adapted), no? What about cost of extra storage (XP being 20 times+ the size of the core Linux system with equivalent base functionality)? What about development tools and educational tools to teach kids about computer programming? Visual Studio just isn't in the cards, you know. And all of this just a tip of the iceberg of problems Windows brings to the table.
Again, your lack of elemental understanding of what is really involved in this undertaking is just staggering. It seems you are proud of your utter ignorance and wish to flaunt it for all to see.
You're just angry because Microsoft is better at selling their software than you are at proseletyzing your bullshit. You, also, should go seek mental help, since you're obviously a paranoid shut-in hoping to waste your words of delusion in the hopes of gaining karma.
The hate and rage just ooze from your posts like slime. Which makes your "advice" all the more ironic. Glass houses and all that...
Really? Rage and contempt? Over a value priced computer aimed at educating kids who otherwise would never get to use ANY computer?
As has been pointed out repeatedly, "educating kids" is an utter impossibility when OLPC+Windows combination is involved. The term you are looking for is "indoctrination". It is so for many, many reasons mentioned already a million times here, not the least of them the lack of any useful free "educational" software for XP, never you mind the storage for it on the OLPC.
Using "ANY" computer, "education" does not make. If that was the case, a far more cost effective way then the OLPC would be to simply ship used throw-away computers that clog our city dumps here (some of them far more powerful then the OLPC will ever be) to Africa in bulk.
You are confusing granting haphazard access to some fraction of the Western commercial technology, which requires a (very expensive) ecosystem of other commercial technology to be useful and which will never be available at the prices those kids can afford, with "educating" them. This is a purely corporatist view of the world and if it were up to people like you, education in the West would consist of giving kids a brand-name calculator (with no instructions) and calling it a "mathematics and electronics course" and as the parent poster insightfully mentioned, "a cooking course" would consist of a bunch of McDonalds coupons, etc and so on.
And there is of course the wee little bit of the matter of active mis-representations Negroponte has engaged in over the years on behalf of the OLPC project, but I guess that is far too esoteric for you to grasp.
You should see a mental health practicioner and get your priorities in order. Your stupidity is clouding your view of reality.
In the light of the actual facts you should take your own advice on this.
Slashdot Mirror
This is merely a variation on the idea. In some cities (outside of USA) the government lays and owns conduits instead of actual cables in them. Each method has pros and cons (the main con of the conduit/right of way being drastic increase of up-front investment for the market players and thus drastic reduction of the number of potential competitors - anything smaller then mega-corps needs not apply - not to mention waste resulting from multiple parallel lines) but any case what is important is the overall concept: municipally controlled last mile.
Because that solution depends on another point of systemic failure: litigation.
A system whereby the municipality owns the last mile (or conduits etc) requires no constant regulatory supervision as long as all competitors are given equal access. A system dependent on forcing an unwilling company, in whose best interest is to thwart all your attempts at forcing them to do this, requires constant monitoring, constant regulatory loophole fixing and as the final result endless litigation, all to questionable effects as all these measures are reactive and do not take effect for years after the harm to consumers was done.
One solution is simple, effective and has a few easily observable points where it could possibly go astray, the other is complex and depends on endless litigation and political maneuvering as primary mechanisms of control.
The only reason to prefer the complex, unwieldy and unreliable over simple and effective is ideological zealotry.
Because it does not work. The whole idea is fundamentally silly, as the telco's "competitors" are forced to buy service from their main competitor. It leads to a situation where the dominant telco is able to pretend that it is selling access "at cost", while in fact obstructing those buying in many different ways, such as creating delays, purposeful technological incompatibilities and what not. In all the marketplaces in which it was tried the dominant telco always won resulting in these "competitors" withdrawing or ... irony ... being bought at bankruptcy prices by that very telco.
Cable television is a perfect example of one of the fatal flaws in the dog-eat-dog capitalism models of the Chicago School of economics, so beloved by various Libertarians, anarcho-capitalists etc. It is an illustration of a rather obvious real-world property of the so-called "free market" which, contrary to carefully fudged "models", allows for (and in fact inevitably leads to) formation of large industry/geography-specific monopolies, even without any governmental interference whatsoever.
That is so simply because in the real world, unlike on paper, there are a number of physical, geographical, technological and other conditions which lead to an automatic formation of unsurmountable barriers to entry for competitors, especially after a local market consolidation by one market player. In this particular case it is simply the physical limitation of the cables themselves: no community can allow for 20 companies to dig up every road every which way to lay cables to any and all houses in that community, not to mention the fact that the upfront cost reduces the number of viable competitors to a mere handful nationally to begin with.
And in this particular case the only entity which can restore competition (and thus "free market") is ... the government. Municipally owned last mile cabling/fiber, bandwidth of which is then rented to any number of competitors who compete for the customers based on their service and price is of course the only sane way to deal with this. But it contradicts the Holy Theory Of Ultimate Greed which proclaims that everything in this world must be owned by some mogul, and therefore it will never come to be, at least in USA. A future of regional communication monopolies getting away with murder is the only alternative really, regardless how many silly lawsuits are filed. The only choice remaining under such market "freedom" being as to which one of the 3 or 4 mega-corporations will be given a strangle-hold on what community.
This is what happens when you are trying to get fancy with tags ...
The sentence was: I for one will not willingly go there.
I am not so sure about that. As things are presently, this whole make-believe world of imaginary property is about to receive a rather substantial non-imaginary kick in its balls from the rather material rest of the economy. It will make all the other "bursting economic bubbles" look something out of your soap tray. Hold on to your (imaginary or otherwise) hats, for it is going to be one hell of a ride.
Which is actually our luck, in the long term, because the only way in which the imaginary property can receive "more legal protections .. then the tangible kind" is in a wholly totalitarian state where all information transmissions are inspected for subversive content. I for one will willingly go there.
So do casinos, astrologists and various legalized Ponzi schemes.
Your point? That foolish people will part with real money in exchange for nothing? That has been going on the "grown-up world" for millenia, ever since the first priest donned his robes.Which, in the eyes of the corporatists. makes all those non-permissive licenses part of "their" team and thus protected. They only despise the "commies" who seek no monetary profit and so they write laws to make sure that their ideological warfare does not result in some undesired side effects, such as some CEO having to face criminal charges for using the "hippie stuff" for gain.
To defeat which argument the corporates will argue that they are charging only for the "service" of "giving away" the software, i.e. you pay for delivery not contents. And in effect they would be right, since they could not put a new copyright on such work, only to sell it as is. My point stands.
I fully realize that this still does not defeat the civil liabilities but the point of the law is to purposefully protect corporates (CEOs particularly) against criminal proceedings, no matter what they do with FOSS software and Creative Commons stuff. They wrote the law and it would be silly for them not to install escape hatches in it for themselves. Civil liabilities are merely the stock of their trade: money. Criminal ones would mean some CEO going to jail and they will not have that in the laws they purchase.
Also, I forgot to add, that the "value over $1000" has another insidious purpose: to exclude copyright infringement by corporations on Creative Commons or FOSS work. The idea is for the corporate lawyers (who in effect wrote the law) to claim that the "nerdy bearded weirdo" in that basement gave the stuff away for free, thus it was only natural for a respectable, upstanding corporation to take his stuff and put it to "good use" for profit. This is in essence the same argument that was used by colonialists everywhere, that the natives were "not using properly" (i.e. up to the invaders' standards) their land, oil and what not.
Which of course makes all copyright infringement into criminal infringement as no copyright holder is ever going to claim less then hundreds of thousands to millions in "losses" per piece of data shared. You see, 1000 million bazillion downloads could have occurred (yes, yes every man, woman and child and their pet parrot could have purchased the thing many times - and soon that will be the only option with "pay-to-read"!) thus depriving the poor copyright holder of a veritable mountains of cash.
That has been the standard "reasoning" in all copyright infringement cases and is unlikely to change. In fact that is the very reason why the clause of "value over $1000" was put in as the writers of the law set it to make sure that every single case qualified. Welcome to lobbyist law writing 101.
I cannot. There can be a person anywhere in the world who could (without even knowing of my existence) change his name to what mine is. I have no means of stopping him. Similarly, something on the order of 20% the Chinese are named Wong (which means King in Chinese).
Yes it is, but it is based on a particular physical aspect of the things being "owned": their ability to occupy only one spot of space-time continuum at a time. That is why land can be owned but information cannot. That is also why scarcity is an elemental component of all laws of "ownership", and thus a foundation of Capitalism. Remove scarcity and you are also removing "ownership" as a meaningful concept as supply becomes infinite.
See above. "Society" (a bunch of lobbyist-bribed politicos to be exact) can "decide" whatever it wants, and it will not change the fundamental nature of things. "Society" can decide that the force of gravity is "illegal" and demand, by law, that everyone floats of their own accord. The force of gravity will simply ignore the wish of the "society" and proceed to keep us firmly grounded.
You and other copyright ideologues are simply raging against one of the fundamental properties of the Universe. Nothing personal, but in this wee fight my money are firmly on the Universe prevailing, no matter how many lawyers and politicians you get into your corner.
What I do or do not, has no bearing on the logic of the argument. That is the way with science. It does not matter of the man writing 2+2=4 is an acclaimed hero, a celebrity, White, Black, Gay, a priest, a thief, a rapist or a bona-fide Fascist. The equation remains true regardless.
Says the "author". The Universe remains unmoved and the sequence of numbers which is the "authors" claim is not only uncontrollable by him, it is also obtainable by others without ever coming in contact with the "author's" "work".
Example: the "author" says that his "composition" of digits "412" is now "his" and no one else can use it without his pemisison. I roll dice 3 times and get the same numbers, never hearing of the "author". In accordance with your inane laws, I am a criminal, for having dared to take advantage of the fact that the numerical sequence exists outside the scope of space-time continuum. Etc and so on.
Some of these things are not like the others...
But I get the gist of your argument, it is simply "My greed is bigger then your science!"
Because that is how it is playing out in practice. Emulators have a lot of drawbacks and maintaining backwards compatibility with earlier, woefully flawed designs is only producing more problems: see also security situation under Windows.
As to web apps, you are defeating your own arguments. The web browsers, their protocols and rendering schemes have changed many times in the period of the last 5 years alone. Most web apps developed just 5 years back would fail to run on today's editions of web browsers.
Much of the "OS independent" stuff are scripts and the like, many of which require POSIX compliance levels not available under Windows (i.e. they require whole UNIX compatible environments of the likes of Cygwin - which is really defeating the whole point). Look, I have been doing FOSS for a very long time and I speak simply from experience as I was asked more then once to try to deploy some FOSS apps on Windows. Even the ones which claim to run on Windows, rarely do, as they are not actively maintained on that platform. It is just the way things are.
All of which suffer from lack of integration with the platform. That is why most non-trivial project authors who are desperate for a Windows port use Microsoft's own tools.
This is getting ludicrous. I will not rehash the whole sordid history of Microsoft's APIs and the rest of the crap that is going on in Windows. Go educate yourself.
LOL. Your uncritical hero worship and wholesale swallowing of the propaganda is amusing. Most if not all of these companies wouldn't even notice if the CEO was hit by a bus and did not show up to work for years. As a matter of fact some of the most highly paid CEOs historically are the ones who presided over their company's collapse or a radical downsizing of revenues.
You mean the ones on Microsoft's payroll? Some "caring".
Sugar is for all intents and purposes dead as far as OLPC is concerned. The only apps that will be worked on are the XP ones and means of integration of commercial "adware" and "crippleware" into the XP image.
Xbox is a single-purpose, single-class of applications running platform. It is worlds apart from what the supposed goals of the OLPC are. But then you are probably right, Microsoft has likely envisioned an "OLPC Xbox", full of commercial "crippleware" with a complete DRM lockdown and 100% of contents controlled by Microsoft a
There are thousands of variants of Homer's Iliad alone (as each translator/transcriber added his own alterations). In fact we do not even know that Homer was the one who wrote it originally.
Given that he was very possibly just an embellisher of a previous text, that would make him a crook, no? Also you exposed yourself as a complete liar, which destroys your credibility on other issues, by claiming that "he got paid for it". No such data is available to historians. You just made shit up to make yourself look more assertive and picked the wrong dude to try this crap on. But I guess this is par for the course with the defenders of copyright laws.
Lies. I gave you mathematical (as in scientific) demonstration which obliterates your entire bullshit line of reasoning. You responded with hot air in the vain of "I can't hear you over the noise of my greedy entitlement to stuff being so awesome!".
Which again, is par for the course. When faced with undebatable logic, your kind will always resort to screams of "But we made a law against it! See! See!".
All of which is utterly irrelevant for this simple reason: you cannot take information. It is impossible due the nature of information itself. If you disagree, demonstrate a way in which I can "take" the integer number 1 from someone. Or any other integer number or a sequence of thereof. This is not a realm of some make-believe bullshit based on your desire to own crap, it is the realm of hard science. If you want to own information, you must first demonstrate that information can be owned.
The flaw in your argument is that you forgot to take into account the fact that software and books, like all information, are in essence immortal. Thus it is possible to build any software, to any level of quality, given only few volunteers over long enough period of time (the volunteer's grand-grand-children can work on it just as well as the original authors). As the GP pointed out quite correctly, information does not obey the same rules as physical goods and therefore there is no "scarcity" possible of ... integer numbers. Which all information is equivalent to (amongst many other possible transforms). Ever hear of someone running out of the integer number 4? Number 7? 8?
Also look at your own example: books. How scarce is Homer's Iliad? What was the last time Homer got paid for it? Did he ever?
This has nothing to do with "ease of copying". But it has everything to do with fundamental properties of information and the attempts by some greed blinded people to apply rules of Capitalism to something which cannot be owned (for not having the necessary attributes for it) and thus cannot be traded.
This is turning into an exchange of whole goddamn essays, for which I really have no time.
Because they cease to interoperate correctly with the rest of the changing software ecosystem. If you manage to stop everyone from changing anything anywhere, and keep your hardware from failing, than you can keep all your software (assuming no crippling bugs are present) unchanged indefinitely. In real life this is an impossibility. This of course has been the engine behind the untold billions raked in by the software industry for dubious "upgrades" and, as such a defender of the Free Market Way, I would think you would be among its adoring cheerleaders. Creating "value" out of thin air and all that...
Which is a rarity.
Not for projects such as this u-turned OLPC. Ideological incompatibility.
You got a curious definition of "often". These are the few FOSS projects with either corporate sponsors interested in paying for expanding into Windows land, or projects with huge user bases, so huge that some their users who are forced (for whatever reasons) to use Windows have finally become so desperate as to do some porting. Statistically, these represent less then 10% of all FOSS projects, although their user base is large. If you take some list of Linux software, say the 60 thousand plus of Debian packages, you will find that less then 500 have Windows ports and these are usually cross-platform development libraries and the like. Part of the problem is of course that in order for FOSS to work on Windows, the developers must purchase both Windows and Visual Studio or some similar toolchain, which goes against of the whole idea of Free Software and is barely tolerated by many of the Open Source people (due to cost and other factors).
You gotta be kidding. Microsoft had a strictly parasitic relationship with the adoption of computers socially. What made it possible was the advancement of micro-electronics, without which the whole point of a "personal computer" would be moot. Most, if not all, ideas employed in Microsoft software are (poor) re-implementations of what went on in Computer Science decades before. If it were not for the fatal error IBM has made in its deal with Microsoft, no one would have heard of Bill Gates today. Please stop with this insane attribution of wholly undeserved merits to Microsoft.
It reminds of all these people who attempt to justify multi-billion salaries of CEOs by painting them as somehow "responsible" for advancement of technology or science, as if there are not thousands of equally (or more) talented people waiting to take their place should the "irreplaceable hero" get hit by the bus.
LOL. That's rich. OS/2 was doomed not because it was "not compatible" (IBM went to great pains to make sure it was - following which Microsoft changed their APIs to break that) or "familiar" (like Win 95 resembled Windows 3.1, or Win 3.1 resembled DOS, right? Right?) but because Microsoft engaged in this wee little plot involving taking all the PC manufacturers hostage, leaving IBM as the only seller of preloaded with it
You are missing the point entirely. The issue is not "digging around code" by the kids (although that is a bonus) but maintainability. According to your own words you now expect piles of haphazard "freeware" to be used as the mainstay of the tools used on such laptops, with no system of assuring that these programs get updated, fixed or otherwise kept up. FOSS is the only remedy (other then fully commercial solutions) in any organized long-term educational effort. You are attempting to pretend that the pay-to-play system, as it functions in wealthy nations, will somehow be magically replicated via freeware with no side effects. In case of FOSS it is frequently the teachers who mess with the educational software (as much of it is intentionally written using simplistic scripting languages) and there is no risk of built-in obsolescence. Closed-source "Freeware" on the other hand is rather famous for being utterly crappy in this department and its life cycle is probably the shortest of all the types of software available.
You seem to think that motivations and ideologies do not matter. Free Software is a magnet for people who are willing to contribute something to society but who are adamant that their contributions will not be simply re-packaged by some jackal and sold for profit. A vast majority of volunteers seems to share this outlook. That is why with the advent Free Software most people who would have otherwise created "freeware" for Windows have long since departed that realm for ideologically compatible ground: Linux. The pool of quality "freeware" Windows programmers is these days really, really shallow, despite of that platform's commercial popularity. "Adware", "Crippleware", "Malware" makers on the other hand are attracted primarily to Windows seeking to satisfy that which motivates them: need for profits.
That just is not true. If the "most popular" system commands 20% of the marketplace, there is no problem. If it commands 95%, forcing 90% of all other software to be written for that platform and if that system is also a property of a singular US corporation, you not only got "a problem" it is a gigantic problem. Windows is single-handedly responsible of throwing the whole of the Computer Science back nearly by an entire generation. Technologies popular at the end of 1960s (like virtualization) are only now becoming available for the Wintel platform. That is 40 years later!
Problems brought on by diversity are on a whole different scale from those brought by monopolistic mono-culture.
Yes, right up until the true meaning of the IMF "reforms" hit them. I guarantee you the feeling is much different now after they have realized what McDonalds
The talk was of remote tribal areas and of languages which traditionally have not seen any sort of computing applied to before. That is why there was a big hoopla about the XO's keyboard and its ability to be configured to weird languages (an artifact of which is that all the keys can be remapped in weirdest ways) and unheard of input methods. This alone tells you that the XO was indeed supposedly targeted at those who do not have the traditional access to education. Perhaps that was idealistic and impractical but it was a major part of the appeal and uniqueness of the project which drew in contributors.
Because not only is their number a fraction of those who contribute to FOSS, but the whole idea of closed source is an anathema to the supposed goals of such a project: education. If you were discussing a project whose aim was to distribute as many variants of solitaire or "trainers" for commercial games as humanely possible throughout the world, or pointless "utilities", the situation would be different. That is where the vast bulk of "freeware" on Windows is. The rest of the "freeware" is in fact "adware" or "crippleware". Attempts at giving away the "first hit" in efforts to hook the user and make him pay for the "full version".
As slaves of the US corporate "culture" you mean? Ever heard of "diversity"? Probably not. Getting wealthier at any cost is a very short-sighted way of thinking which has lead to untold disasters in the past. Also, it is the ultimate hubris and arrogance to think that everyone wants mini-Americas everywhere. This is the "thought" that drove the PNAC cabal with Bush in front to invade Iraq. Apparently there was an American, desperate to burst out of, in every Iraqi, or some such.
But skipping the wider geo-political implications of the Microsoftization of the Universe, the main point of this discussion was that OLPC was supposed to be different, billed itself as being different and attracted supporters on the basis of being different. Remove that and the whole point of the OLPC project disappears. Any old "charity" can refurbish old laptops (most of which are way more powerful then the XO) and ship them bulk to the places you mentioned.
You mean the demand is still there, but from now on it will be only fulfilled in the easiest and most juicy (from the perspective of potential commercially strategic gains) areas. That means that the OPLC has lost its edge and the real attack will come from the likes of ASUS who soon be able to achieve the prices those wealthiest of poor nations can afford. And software piracy will take care of the rest, which ironically will result in firmly putting Microsoft in the dri
Not according to the original project evangelizing done by Negroponte. The audiences you describe do not need a specialized OLPC laptop at all, they would be much better served by refurbished and much more powerful laptops, which then can indeed run Windows and all the other jazz. OLPC's XO laptop made sense only if it were targeted at the kids in the tribal and impoverished areas. That is why there was talk during the original design process about hand-cranked generators and what not.
But is the source of it accessible? Freeware does not mean FOSS, especially on Windows. If not, the point is moot, the "freeware" is a single-language (most likely English) wonder which cannot be deployed even to the places you listed as none of them are English speaking.
I am sure Steve Ballmer will be pleased. And the OLPC version of Windows will therefore come with no DRM ....
It is, given the original project parameters. If you change the parameters drastically then of course the solution will change as well ...
Err.. the governments in question are famous for being, for all intents and purposes, hives of villainous corruption and conspiracies. Add Microsoft into the mix ...
As to removing XP, sure (assuming no nasty DRM will be put into the boot-loader - which actually was the case with Linux - yes I know, nuts, but that's Negroponte for ya) what is the point of going through the whole rigmarole then?
That "excitement" took a huge hit, as evidenced right here at Slashdot, particularly amongst those who were the most prone to write stuff for the XO, after the Negroponte's u-turn.
Perheaps, but then a number one no-no for a project such as this is to pull stunts of the kind Negroponte just did. Alienating your most fervent supporters and replacing them with a multi-national corporation with decidedly questionable motives is not something that bodes well for the future of the project. Just from the good will and political stand points alone (which is critical for a project of this nature).
Fallacy #1: there is no "market". Unless by "market" you mean kids using free software who will never pay a dime for it. That is why FOSS was essential to this, no one else will, barring multi-million g
You are working with a Western-centric point of view, disregarding the fact that many (if not most) of the target (as per original project goals) kids do not speak English and require all their software to be localized in some tribal language, some of which have barely a written alphabet. When you take this into account, the whole logic of "easy access" to software falls apart (and that is irrespective of the fact that many of the places the XO laptops were supposedly meant for do not have any access to communication facilities and thus any access, easy or otherwise, to any additional software not already on the laptop. That is why, amongst the original, now quite forgotten, goals of the project was to cram as much of different kinds of software as possible the limited storage capacity. Linux was perfectly suited for that given the near complete coverage of the whole spectrum of possible applications in a relatively (compared to other systems) very small space. And ease of localization ... and a million of other reasons.
Then of course is the cost of that "easy" accessible software. Windows on its own is useless and only becomes useful with the whole software ecosystem of dominant on the platform applications, each and every one of which exceeds the cost of the entire XO laptop many-fold! And then there is speed and storage, XO not being designed to run a full-fledged Office or Visual Studio ... and on and on and on.
Look, I am not going to go over this ad-nauseum for the millionth time. Go look at the many prior Slashdot discussions about the OLPC project.
Again, you are having difficulties disassociating yourself from your personal experiences and the Western outlook on things. You also conveniently forget that during the DOS and early Windows days one of the main vectors of "learning" by kids was ... rampant piracy. I personally have nothing against it, as I am an opponent of the whole Intellectual Property nonsense, but if this method is not going to be a) tolerated in a Microsoft controlled (no matter what Negroponte says) project, and b) it is no longer viable without high speed internet connections, given the monstrous size of these applications (never you mind that XO will never be able to run them).
In essence Linux (or perheaps BSD or some such) was the only method by which the project goals, as originally stated, could have been achieved. That is why I said what I said. This has nothing to do with my dislike of Microsoft and its tactics, but is simply a result of logical analysis of the requirements versus what XP is bringing to the table. My reaction would have been similar with Mac OSX. These systems are simply not fit for the task, when you take the whole of the picture into account.
So by using XP, Negroponte has essentially abandoned the original goals of the project and re-shaped it to be very narrowly applicable only to Western language speaking centers of former colonies with a relatively well developed communication and societal infrastructure, and even then I have no clue what is he planning to do with the woefully inadequate power of the XO in this new role for which it was not designed. This and also the rest of whole host of new problems brought on board along with XP.
It was a very disappointing move and a wholesale betrayal of all those people who he was so busy convincing with his previous set of goals. If you ad
Yes, of course, naturally, undoubtedly, a hooker going to public places in stilettos and 3 inch long skirts is really concerned, I mean, first and foremost, about what the parents of her friends would think! And obviously, naturally, logically, she is also going to go to college, paid fully by her Mom, and thus is most concerned about ... being held hostage by the funding of her future education!
You gotta be kidding me ...
In the light of the above I am not sure who looks more like an idiot.
I simply point out possibilities (with a large degree of probability, based on other factors in the story) which are automatically dismissed out of hand by the "Think of the Children" Flaming Pinhead Crusaders, as these possibilities are a great obstacle to their attempts at justification of their merry witch-hunts.
Which is it, we cannot tell with any degree of certainty from some newspaper blurb by some witch-hunter sympathetic jurno. Which is pretty much all of them - one of the effects of fascist tactics is that all journalists are afraid to appear in any way not "in tune" with the Holy Inquisition for fear of reprisals. Just as all the journalists were scared shit-less not to appear "unpatriotic" when another group of fascists were busy drumming up a conquest of a foreign country for profit. Same mentality and curiously a very overlapping cross-section of fascists in both camps.
Not in many, many countries around the world. Odds are your shoes or your shirt were made by a 12-year old.
As it was pointed out by me repeatedly, "power over them" does not translate to merely talking them into doing things. Threats of violence? Yes. Chit-chat ... err ... no!
All these screwed up Holier Then Thou Defenders of Questionable Virtue would like it to be every which way they want to have it: its abuse if the kid gets beaten into it, its "abuse" if he gets talked into it, its "abuse" if he comes onto someone, its "abuse" if he talks himself into it! It is always some "abuse" somewhere by someone with them! If no "abusers" are to be found anywhere ... then, fuck, the kid abused himself! Put him into the slammer! Which is what they do! "Child Protectors" my ass. More like protectors of the Glorious Inerrant Ideology Which Makes Them Feel So Pompously Important (and the price be damned).
Of course none of this has to do with any real abuse (which is based on threats of violence and where the abuser always attempts to maintain secrecy). It has everything to do however with their totally messed up, hypocritical, paranoid, delusional attitudes to sex or anything even remotely resembling sex. This sex-related idiocy permeates every aspect of Judeo-Christian religions, it extends way beyond anything to do with children an
That provides no feedback to the AC.
Anger? Since when mentioning the obvious logical implications is now called "anger"? You ascribing your emotions to me.
So far the OLPC hasn't produced much of anything very useful in the field, Windows or Linux notwithstanding, admittedly because the task is very difficult and the project young. With Windows their job just got harder by an order of magnitude and again, I shall not rehash the many, many reasons why, you can look up all the other Slashdot discussions on this.
Subsequently, judging by past performance and all the other factors involved, my bet is firmly on the "Epic Fail" outcome.
Then the OLPC project, as a whole, is pointless, right? You can't have it both ways, you know. Either there is an "enormous glut" of "free" "educational" software for Windows out there, that is useful out of the box for the application (i.e. localized in 20+ languages, including Swahili) in which case OLPC is moot as we can just ship it on all those Windows laptops presently headed for the garbage bin at the fraction of the cost, or the OLPC is needed to make custom-tailored software for this platform in accordance with the original OLPC project mission, in which case there is no free software for XP presently available suitable for this task and it has to be written from scratch (or adapted), no? What about cost of extra storage (XP being 20 times+ the size of the core Linux system with equivalent base functionality)? What about development tools and educational tools to teach kids about computer programming? Visual Studio just isn't in the cards, you know. And all of this just a tip of the iceberg of problems Windows brings to the table.
Again, your lack of elemental understanding of what is really involved in this undertaking is just staggering. It seems you are proud of your utter ignorance and wish to flaunt it for all to see.
The hate and rage just ooze from your posts like slime. Which makes your "advice" all the more ironic. Glass houses and all that ...
AC posts like this are a perfect example why all ACs should be by default moderated as "-1 Noise".
As has been pointed out repeatedly, "educating kids" is an utter impossibility when OLPC+Windows combination is involved. The term you are looking for is "indoctrination". It is so for many, many reasons mentioned already a million times here, not the least of them the lack of any useful free "educational" software for XP, never you mind the storage for it on the OLPC.
Using "ANY" computer, "education" does not make. If that was the case, a far more cost effective way then the OLPC would be to simply ship used throw-away computers that clog our city dumps here (some of them far more powerful then the OLPC will ever be) to Africa in bulk.
You are confusing granting haphazard access to some fraction of the Western commercial technology, which requires a (very expensive) ecosystem of other commercial technology to be useful and which will never be available at the prices those kids can afford, with "educating" them. This is a purely corporatist view of the world and if it were up to people like you, education in the West would consist of giving kids a brand-name calculator (with no instructions) and calling it a "mathematics and electronics course" and as the parent poster insightfully mentioned, "a cooking course" would consist of a bunch of McDonalds coupons, etc and so on.
And there is of course the wee little bit of the matter of active mis-representations Negroponte has engaged in over the years on behalf of the OLPC project, but I guess that is far too esoteric for you to grasp.
In the light of the actual facts you should take your own advice on this.