Sorry, but the author made it clear that nobody was initially in charge as the coordinator of executing in several S.Am. countries for the distribution and system to be put in place for what was going to be about a million OLPCs as I recall.
After reading the article, it becomes apparent that they did NOT have proper business management of the OLPC project, and you don't get managers of large projects from teaching staff and professors.
I found it a depressing read. With a key person who focused on the half dozen key concepts and stuck to them, maybe OLPC could have been better with fewer hiccups. It would likely have taken a Steve Jobs to make the decisions & push needed buttons.
I see the value in business picking the best commercial hardware choice.
I do NOT see the value in forcing proprietary solutions on the third world, but also do not see the value of having software OS & Applications that can get corrupted in a device to be thrown out in the middle of nowhere. In other words, I think it would take running the OS & core applications in flash memory.
The UI is a core issue. Why should it be materially different from what a billion computers already run? If the students are going to be able to go onward from OLPC, then their "language" must be "compatible" with the other "computers" they will see later.
Too many questions. Not enough answers. Then politics hits along with MS Money.
I listened & watched the presentation, and with respect to automatic copyrights and 75 years after the individual dies or whatever, I agree there needs to be a reduction to the time periods and automatic creation, but that is copyright.
In the field of mechanical objects, for utility patents, it often takes a large expense and a lot of time to get a concept for an improvement or new idea or "invention" if you will to work, and be cost effective and safe.
If you took one year out of your life to create a better widget, and then wanted to produce it, would a venture capitalist or bank be willing to fund production, if you do not have a way to keep the competition from copying your work? After all, some companies who are well extablished with lots of cash would love to copy everything it sees which it could use in its products, and you would not have any way to then sell your better widget. A VC is not going to fund a physical product, if there is not a chance of some form of protection from copycats.
A classic case of a new product today might be better battery technology. Right now everyone wants better batteries. They will help get the world off of petroleum for transportation uses eventually. Sure, it is just improvements people are patenting, but there are hundreds of millions in VC funding (maybe billions) backing hundreds of companies trying to come up with better products. VCs (or pension funds, or banks, or individuals) do this because they think they will make a good return on their funds, and that means avoiding having General Electric or Everready or Panasonic's battery division just copy your 5 year effort "for free".
I do not think individuals or anyone will elect to fund a 5 year effort (A123Systems.com for instance) to make a better battery technology.
If we do not provide the limited period of patent exclusivity, I somehow doubt VCs will fund much hardware innovation. Yet what does society need? Better materials, processes, coatings, machines, energy systems, plastics, and a thousand other specific things to make society more efficient, less polluting, less labor intensive, etc.
Most innovation tends to initially start with small companies or individuals, as far as I've heard, and I can't see that happening without some way to "sell" your invention.
I think the gentlemen in the video has never had to consider how he would earn a living outside of being a lawyer and talking all the time. Yeah I am exaggerating a bit.
I'll bet Jobs & Co. are willing to spend the $100 million on gobs of prototypes and the extensive innovation that will do a breakout on screen and data input.
for anything it buys: 3000 years ago or so, Sun Tzu said 'Governments always pay the highest price in wartime.'
Given that defense amounts to "wartime", is the Congress going to understand fully the need to have top notch people and equipment for understanding & engaging cyber threats and warfare in all its forms, and then Funding it Properly?
"It flies in the face of the hacker/tinkerer ethic."
Well not wanting to buy a terrific $400 phone because you would have to jailbreak it to do wacky things is not enough advantage? I can easily see Apple's side of not wanting to try to support iPhone buyers with problems because of user a installed "Wackalicious" program trashed their phone somehow. That would COST Apple money. Apple is a private company selling a proprietary good product which it gives support on, and I think they are doing business right.
At the price of the iPhone, I consider it a throw-away. I've bought a lot of phones (initial Star-Tac) that were more expensive, and of every single one I bought, except the original Moto flip-phone, have been difficult & very restrictive to say the least. I CAN'T say that about the iPhone.
Even if all one wants to do as a programmer/hacker is learn, the cost of an iPhone & SDK is trivial.
The prime requirement from the constitution for the federal government is to protect our country, & yet they can't be bothered to patch known holes in their systems:-(
After you've bought 250 movies, and the DRM they made "back then" is no longer supported, DVD Jon will have made sure you can still see what you bought.
I've tried to point out problems to several people (the ones with Post-It notes with their passwords on screen corners or under keyboards). They don't want to take the time to learn enough and make a method for keeping things "straight". They just want things "to work, like the TV".
I've pointed out to one friend that letting people use your account on your Mac will eventually cause problems (half a dozen teenage grandkids = reinstall the OS after God knows what was done). She wasn't interested in setting up a Guest account.
I've pointed out to one friend that with 3 late grade school kids he needs parental control software on his Dell to keep the kids in line (at least a bit), but that fell on deaf ears. I pointed out his home PC was a part of a Botnet (3 gradeschool kids on the machine, so no wonder). I specifically noted that means virtually anything on that machine including passwords he types is known to the person who controls the BotNet including any financial or work docs (he's a lawyer). He said he would fix it, but 9 months later, it is obvious nothing changed, except... they found the kids surfing porn.
I mentioned that the "Near Zero" time for a busy person to fix "the problems" is a MacMini for around $600, and they can still run Windows XP if they want. No change observed.
I simply have no answer for dumb human habits used by smart people. They are good friends, so I don't say anything more.
Warren Buffett saw it back in the early 90s when he said he wouldn't invest in Microsoft, because he didn't see a profitable business model (long term...Buffett's method).
Desperation is driving MS to use everything they can to continue the profit line, including using acquisitions to get what they couldn't create.
I don't have anything bad to say about MS, and use some of their products, but given their CEO's reputation and his lack of experience in any other large company, & changing FOSS world, I have this gut feel that says MS is going to have a REAL HARD time expanding its yearly sales and profits.
The key in the large $7.2B U.S. loss at the French bank is horrible management of their "IT Systems".
That 7.2B loss is merely the latest in a long string of losses at both public firms and governments, because of the failures in management systems &/or flawed risk analysis at the very beginning in understanding whether the system can survive fast market changes or "bubbles".
That is the lesson to be learned from all of this.
In addition then, one has to ask if a large sophisticated bank CAN NOT control its risks, and governments can't control theirs (has any major government program figured out how to significantly decrease costs of inefficiency and fraud?), and particularly that the Fed, OBM, FASB, SEC and others all passed on the newer bundled mortgage securities, can the government be relied on to oversee what is right and wrong for business risks? This is a big question.
These "big business risks" like at the French Bank, were NOT the norm that many years ago, but now they are allowed by governments.
If "Big Banks" shareholders and lenders and customers are allowed "government insurance" and then the government allows high risk or bad governance, government has failed us.
It may be that technology has become so complex that companies and governments do not yet have the technology systems to properly monitor and track what is really going on.
To that end, that means they need to create more sophisticated systems, and both private and government systems need to be able to be curtailed when it is found that the systems are going wrong.
Yeah, in a way it is not glib-speak, but it is important to the French bank and every other bank and brokerage out there.
Hundreds of billions of losses, because Wall Street figured out how to "package" "insured" mortgages on "inherently safe" homes, where the under-girding asset is solid ground that is "always" appreciating on average.
If nothing else, the article on the $7B loss in France ought to serve as another wake up call to "managed risk systems".
The PHDs, the MBAs, the CFOs & the Risk Analysis people with their algorithms all pronounced it a sound "system".
What they didn't look at was what happens when mortgage companies and individual salesmen and appraiser's collude to scam property values and borrower's financial condition (along with pressure from Jesse Jackson & Villagarosa types to not discriminate "against race").
The top level control system was probably figured out tightly.
Monitoring the entry level data risk was and is a disaster. Hundreds of billions at the very least are lost (transferred if you will) as a result.
How come I don't hear of any call for heads to be lopped off in the mortgage bundling business? Maybe money, power & influence in Washington anyone?
You can bet there are some very highly placed traders in these securities whose customers would like to do that.
Suck in the losers, invtroverts, and weak and tell them they can do better with their consulting methods and give the weak a free "audit". Shuck and jive the loser and convince him to continue, but of course then he has to pay big time.
All of these "do good" plans while honestly made, continually avoid the ultimate problem, regardless of whether capitalism, socialism or something else runs the markets.
The available supply of water and agriculturally farmable land limits the number of people that can live on the earth. You can argue about how many people it can support, but with a doubling rate of less than 50-100 years I can guarantee the thinkers, prognosticators and leaders of the world will find out fairly soon.
There will be calls for the "fat" countries to share their food. The EU will try to take food from the UK, and deliver it elsewhere, like the Sahara, where no one in their right mind would live anyway, except that by that time they have had subsidies and their population doubled or quadrupled again pushing people into less than subsistence, because they become literal beggars of the EU.
History has tended to show of mass migrations of people when starvation occurs, with invasion, war and revolution being the words used to describe such things.
Given Bills ostensible abilities at computing and access to lots of processor cycles, I would think such a smart man (?) could do something other than talk about what is just an artifact of what the whole earth is heading toward.
But then again, that is real tough, with lots of hard work, and I think Bill Gates is into jetting around the world on a permanent vacation now. Time will tell.
And many computer users do nothing to stop the breaches on their computer.
I showed a friend (high up attorney) who does some legal work at home, though his kids do most of the time on his HP, that someone has control of his PC. 60-90% CPU cycles going constantly with no applications running while on his DSL line. Warned him of the consequences.
6+ months later, he has not changed a thing. What can you do?
Next I'll find out they threw a key logger on his machine and stole something, and he will be complaining.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is time you hired a more competent CIO, who makes it a priority to EXECUTE on security issues.
Sorry, but the author made it clear that nobody was initially in charge as the coordinator of executing in several S.Am. countries for the distribution and system to be put in place for what was going to be about a million OLPCs as I recall.
That is a Lack of Management.
After reading the article, it becomes apparent that they did NOT have proper business management of the OLPC project, and you don't get managers of large projects from teaching staff and professors.
I found it a depressing read. With a key person who focused on the half dozen key concepts and stuck to them, maybe OLPC could have been better with fewer hiccups. It would likely have taken a Steve Jobs to make the decisions & push needed buttons.
I see the value in business picking the best commercial hardware choice.
I do NOT see the value in forcing proprietary solutions on the third world, but also do not see the value of having software OS & Applications that can get corrupted in a device to be thrown out in the middle of nowhere. In other words, I think it would take running the OS & core applications in flash memory.
The UI is a core issue. Why should it be materially different from what a billion computers already run? If the students are going to be able to go onward from OLPC, then their "language" must be "compatible" with the other "computers" they will see later.
Too many questions. Not enough answers. Then politics hits along with MS Money.
I listened & watched the presentation, and with respect to automatic copyrights and 75 years after the individual dies or whatever, I agree there needs to be a reduction to the time periods and automatic creation, but that is copyright.
In the field of mechanical objects, for utility patents, it often takes a large expense and a lot of time to get a concept for an improvement or new idea or "invention" if you will to work, and be cost effective and safe.
If you took one year out of your life to create a better widget, and then wanted to produce it, would a venture capitalist or bank be willing to fund production, if you do not have a way to keep the competition from copying your work? After all, some companies who are well extablished with lots of cash would love to copy everything it sees which it could use in its products, and you would not have any way to then sell your better widget. A VC is not going to fund a physical product, if there is not a chance of some form of protection from copycats.
A classic case of a new product today might be better battery technology. Right now everyone wants better batteries. They will help get the world off of petroleum for transportation uses eventually. Sure, it is just improvements people are patenting, but there are hundreds of millions in VC funding (maybe billions) backing hundreds of companies trying to come up with better products. VCs (or pension funds, or banks, or individuals) do this because they think they will make a good return on their funds, and that means avoiding having General Electric or Everready or Panasonic's battery division just copy your 5 year effort "for free".
I do not think individuals or anyone will elect to fund a 5 year effort (A123Systems.com for instance) to make a better battery technology.
If we do not provide the limited period of patent exclusivity, I somehow doubt VCs will fund much hardware innovation. Yet what does society need? Better materials, processes, coatings, machines, energy systems, plastics, and a thousand other specific things to make society more efficient, less polluting, less labor intensive, etc.
Most innovation tends to initially start with small companies or individuals, as far as I've heard, and I can't see that happening without some way to "sell" your invention.
I think the gentlemen in the video has never had to consider how he would earn a living outside of being a lawyer and talking all the time. Yeah I am exaggerating a bit.
Would not be surprised.
Well after the "complete idiots" who stole the tapes read Slashdot, they know know they hit the jackpot.
Gotta be a lot of retired mainframe guys around who would "do a consulting job".
Fudging is what you do when you are a smart monopolist.
Lies are what you use when your mind is gone.
I'll bet Jobs & Co. are willing to spend the $100 million on gobs of prototypes and the extensive innovation that will do a breakout on screen and data input.
To date, what I see looks a bit recycled.
for anything it buys: 3000 years ago or so, Sun Tzu said 'Governments always pay the highest price in wartime.' Given that defense amounts to "wartime", is the Congress going to understand fully the need to have top notch people and equipment for understanding & engaging cyber threats and warfare in all its forms, and then Funding it Properly?
"It flies in the face of the hacker/tinkerer ethic."
Well not wanting to buy a terrific $400 phone because you would have to jailbreak it to do wacky things is not enough advantage? I can easily see Apple's side of not wanting to try to support iPhone buyers with problems because of user a installed "Wackalicious" program trashed their phone somehow. That would COST Apple money. Apple is a private company selling a proprietary good product which it gives support on, and I think they are doing business right.
At the price of the iPhone, I consider it a throw-away. I've bought a lot of phones (initial Star-Tac) that were more expensive, and of every single one I bought, except the original Moto flip-phone, have been difficult & very restrictive to say the least. I CAN'T say that about the iPhone.
Even if all one wants to do as a programmer/hacker is learn, the cost of an iPhone & SDK is trivial.
The prime requirement from the constitution for the federal government is to protect our country, & yet they can't be bothered to patch known holes in their systems :-(
No knowledge of open source?
No knowledge of the LONG TERM issues of proprietary data formats?
No knowledge of the lock in issues involved in mandating only one OS & hardware platform?
You think the LOC IT department can't read the publications it gets every month?
Guy Fi ;-)
Still have my Hermes portable from the 60s that I went through school with. That was an easy carriage return to make.
But if you like excersize. The old 50 lb cast iron Royal I learned to type on had a literal carriage whose weight exceeded the weght of my Hermes.
After you've bought 250 movies, and the DRM they made "back then" is no longer supported, DVD Jon will have made sure you can still see what you bought.
OK?
I've tried to point out problems to several people (the ones with Post-It notes with their passwords on screen corners or under keyboards). They don't want to take the time to learn enough and make a method for keeping things "straight". They just want things "to work, like the TV".
I've pointed out to one friend that letting people use your account on your Mac will eventually cause problems (half a dozen teenage grandkids = reinstall the OS after God knows what was done). She wasn't interested in setting up a Guest account.
I've pointed out to one friend that with 3 late grade school kids he needs parental control software on his Dell to keep the kids in line (at least a bit), but that fell on deaf ears. I pointed out his home PC was a part of a Botnet (3 gradeschool kids on the machine, so no wonder). I specifically noted that means virtually anything on that machine including passwords he types is known to the person who controls the BotNet including any financial or work docs (he's a lawyer). He said he would fix it, but 9 months later, it is obvious nothing changed, except... they found the kids surfing porn.
I mentioned that the "Near Zero" time for a busy person to fix "the problems" is a MacMini for around $600, and they can still run Windows XP if they want. No change observed.
I simply have no answer for dumb human habits used by smart people. They are good friends, so I don't say anything more.
Bill Gates: "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."
Unfortunately, you have to put what you have learned into practice a lot better than we are hearing.
MS sees the handwriting on the wall.
Warren Buffett saw it back in the early 90s when he said he wouldn't invest in Microsoft, because he didn't see a profitable business model (long term...Buffett's method).
Desperation is driving MS to use everything they can to continue the profit line, including using acquisitions to get what they couldn't create.
I don't have anything bad to say about MS, and use some of their products, but given their CEO's reputation and his lack of experience in any other large company, & changing FOSS world, I have this gut feel that says MS is going to have a REAL HARD time expanding its yearly sales and profits.
""The issue of encryption "would have to be faced," Sherman admitted after talking about the wonders of filtering."
Sheesh!
The key in the large $7.2B U.S. loss at the French bank is horrible management of their "IT Systems".
That 7.2B loss is merely the latest in a long string of losses at both public firms and governments, because of the failures in management systems &/or flawed risk analysis at the very beginning in understanding whether the system can survive fast market changes or "bubbles".
That is the lesson to be learned from all of this.
In addition then, one has to ask if a large sophisticated bank CAN NOT control its risks, and governments can't control theirs (has any major government program figured out how to significantly decrease costs of inefficiency and fraud?), and particularly that the Fed, OBM, FASB, SEC and others all passed on the newer bundled mortgage securities, can the government be relied on to oversee what is right and wrong for business risks? This is a big question.
These "big business risks" like at the French Bank, were NOT the norm that many years ago, but now they are allowed by governments.
If "Big Banks" shareholders and lenders and customers are allowed "government insurance" and then the government allows high risk or bad governance, government has failed us.
It may be that technology has become so complex that companies and governments do not yet have the technology systems to properly monitor and track what is really going on.
To that end, that means they need to create more sophisticated systems, and both private and government systems need to be able to be curtailed when it is found that the systems are going wrong.
Yeah, in a way it is not glib-speak, but it is important to the French bank and every other bank and brokerage out there.
Hundreds of billions of losses, because Wall Street figured out how to "package" "insured" mortgages on "inherently safe" homes, where the under-girding asset is solid ground that is "always" appreciating on average.
If nothing else, the article on the $7B loss in France ought to serve as another wake up call to "managed risk systems".
The PHDs, the MBAs, the CFOs & the Risk Analysis people with their algorithms all pronounced it a sound "system".
What they didn't look at was what happens when mortgage companies and individual salesmen and appraiser's collude to scam property values and borrower's financial condition (along with pressure from Jesse Jackson & Villagarosa types to not discriminate "against race").
The top level control system was probably figured out tightly.
Monitoring the entry level data risk was and is a disaster. Hundreds of billions at the very least are lost (transferred if you will) as a result.
How come I don't hear of any call for heads to be lopped off in the mortgage bundling business? Maybe money, power & influence in Washington anyone?
You can bet there are some very highly placed traders in these securities whose customers would like to do that.
Suck in the losers, invtroverts, and weak and tell them they can do better with their consulting methods and give the weak a free "audit". Shuck and jive the loser and convince him to continue, but of course then he has to pay big time.
All of these "do good" plans while honestly made, continually avoid the ultimate problem, regardless of whether capitalism, socialism or something else runs the markets.
The available supply of water and agriculturally farmable land limits the number of people that can live on the earth. You can argue about how many people it can support, but with a doubling rate of less than 50-100 years I can guarantee the thinkers, prognosticators and leaders of the world will find out fairly soon.
There will be calls for the "fat" countries to share their food. The EU will try to take food from the UK, and deliver it elsewhere, like the Sahara, where no one in their right mind would live anyway, except that by that time they have had subsidies and their population doubled or quadrupled again pushing people into less than subsistence, because they become literal beggars of the EU.
History has tended to show of mass migrations of people when starvation occurs, with invasion, war and revolution being the words used to describe such things.
Given Bills ostensible abilities at computing and access to lots of processor cycles, I would think such a smart man (?) could do something other than talk about what is just an artifact of what the whole earth is heading toward.
But then again, that is real tough, with lots of hard work, and I think Bill Gates is into jetting around the world on a permanent vacation now. Time will tell.
MS doesn't "care about the individual customer..", and that is because an individual user customer is NOT MS's customer.
It is Dell, HP, Fujitsu & Sony who are MS's primary customers.
And many computer users do nothing to stop the breaches on their computer.
I showed a friend (high up attorney) who does some legal work at home, though his kids do most of the time on his HP, that someone has control of his PC. 60-90% CPU cycles going constantly with no applications running while on his DSL line. Warned him of the consequences.
6+ months later, he has not changed a thing. What can you do?
Next I'll find out they threw a key logger on his machine and stole something, and he will be complaining.