"Most people are calling for some reasonable give and take"
That sounds reasonable. The problem is that reasonable give and take was established a very long time ago. The record labels are not asking for unreasonable give and take. Meeting me half way isn't reasonable if I've already traveled half way, and you are saying half way from where we are now.
The entire gaming console market would seem to disagree with you. That entire business model is based on the premise that you make almost no money on the hardware, and maybe even lose money on it, so that you can make a killing on all of the software that is sold for it.
OK, I'll admit that I don't know everything that this device might have been advertised to do, but my understanding is that it is an e-book reader. If that is the case, a built in tracking device that was not disclosed is WAY over the top in unacceptable behavior. Is it even legal to install tracking devices in peoples belongings without their knowledge? At the very least I would consider this stalking. Really, this is tin foil hat stuff. If people started complaining that they were being tracked by this device prior to it being proven it has tracking capabilities, everyone else would have thought the complainer was insane.
"Yes, a poor rural US school could use an XO, but you ignore the fact that if they can afford to buy a Classmate, then OLPC shouldn't give them anything."
This seems to be a point that many are confused about. Probably because they keep hearing about kids being 'given free laptops'. The OLPC is not giving laptops to anyone. They are selling laptops. This is because they are selling them to the government, and having the government give away the laptops. By doing this, they get the press of giving laptops away, when in fact they are selling them. So, if the poor rural US or 3rd world school can afford an XO, they likely can afford a Classmate.
"Just use the right tools for the job."
This gets said a lot, and PERHAPS Windows is the right tool for the job, but that is highly debatable. Just because nails will successfully hold a door closed, it doesn't mean that you want to use them instead of a standard door lock. My point is that using a tool that solves the problem today, but creates a lot more work and problems down the line, is not the right tool for the job. That being said, I definitely have not been sold on the Sugar interface that is being used on the OLPC. It seems to be different, just for the sake of being different.
I don't see why these moves against OLPC is a surprise to anyone. Just look at the design of the it. It was clearly designed as a way for various companies to trick other people into pay for their R&D by setting up a questionable charity. I still think the original $100 price tag is expensive for what they are claiming to try to accomplish. The $200 price tag is down right retail. Expect to see more stories about people and companies pulling out so that they can use the R&D that was paid for with donations in their regular business.
Now wait a minute. First you argue that vaccines won't catch on because people won't just take them, then you turn around and argue that people will take any vaccine the government tells them. Which is it?
That is because HPV will prevent someone from suffering ill effects caused by "immoral behavior", whereas a cocaine vaccine would prevent the "immoral behavior" itself. Now, if the HPV prevented people from enjoying sex, and thus reduced them to using it only for procreation, you would see a different landscape. Most of the people that are currently against it, would become for it, and many that are for it would become against it.
A better example is the Chicken Pox vaccine. It became 'required', and everyone went along with it. Even though it trades a major childhood inconvenience for a real risk of a deadly disease as an adult. I know very few parents that have even bothered to look at what they are allowing to be pumped into their kids. They are told that it is part of the standard vaccine package, and they go with it.
Any movie playing device that does not just start playing the movie when it is inserted is broken from design. Yes that includes DVD players. It makes absolutely no sense to bring up a feature (the menu) that will be needed.01% of the time, instead of the feature that will be used 99.99% of the time. This is particularly a poor design choice when the process of going from the 99.99% used feature to the.01% feature is the same as the other way around. The design of the DVD belongs in a UI hall of shame.
That would be fine because they would then ignore any names that are on the site. Thus if you wanted to check a domain, and didn't want it squatted, you submit it to the site, and the squatters ignore it. So, if the squatters filter on the contents of the site, your problem is still solved.
The trick is to set up a web site that supplies the list of domains to be searched. That way people could set up a small utility to automatically grab the list and search. This would indicate that lots of people are interested in the domain name. By making the lookups randomize over a week or two and randomizing the time that the search is done, the system would make it much more difficult to filter out.
Now, the squatters COULD start developing a list of IP addresses that are doing lookups, and filtering them out of their results. Of course, this would be all right as it would mean you were protected from someone sneaking in and squatting the name you looked up. Even if the squatters filtered on both IP address AND multiple hits, this could be resolved by allowing real name lookups to be submitted into the random name lookup web site. Then if you wanted to lookup ihatedomainnamesquatters.com, not only you but everyone else that has been looking up random names, will look up ihatedomainnamesquatters.com also. It would be virtually impossible to tell the difference between real interest, and fake.
Plus, if you wanted to both fund the site AND be ironic, you could put advertising on the web page.
This all comes down to whether the law sees this data as "YOUR data", or "data ABOUT YOU". I think the law should be written that says it is your data. Thus anyone that wants to use it has to get your permission to use it. If there is any kind of "Intellectual Property" that really exists, it is your personal information.
I agree that the modem not working is a problem. I also understand that it was probably a lot cheaper to get the board with the modem than without, and they may have hopes of adding a driver for the modem later. The obvious solution is that they should have put a plug in the modem that could not be removed with your fingers, but could be removed with a paperclip. This would have made the modem a non-issue on release. By putting a dummy driver package on the system by default, they could add the driver, and notify the user of both the added functionality, and how to remove the plug, through a update manager. No one would have complained, and lots of people would be ecstatic to turn on their computer one day and get a pop-up that has a picture and directions saying "Push a paper clip into 'this --->' hole in the back of your computer to remove the plug. This will activate your FREE modem upgrade!". A simple cheap piece of plastic would solved this problem.
Flash not being installed is not an issue. Flash has never been pre-installed on any system I have ever bought. It is neither a surprise, nor a disappointment that it is not installed on this machine.
I agree that if a I would take back a Windows machine if the modem didn't work, so it is a shame that they didn't think about just plugging the hole. The resolution issue, much like the Flash issue, isn't an issue at all. Not having the highest resolution default is common in the Windows world was well when a computer doesn't come with a monitor. If anything, defaulting to a 1280 width is too high, as some of the people buying this computer will be using hand me monitors that may only go to 800x600.
So, I would say the only real flaw was the lack of a plastic plug in the modem.
This is the kind of comment that highlight one of the problems with dog owners. The vast majority of dog owners are insane. Not, wow, I can't believe he did that, insane. But, the kind of insane where they cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. This person actually used the word 'racism' when talking about dogs.
For all the borderline crazy people that are not too far gone. Dogs are not people.
My first thought is, so what. Having a monopoly is not illegal. It is only illegal if you use it to control other markets. The illegal monopoly complaint against MS is not that they have the most popular OS, or the most popular Office package. It is that they previously used their monopoly in the OS market to illegally leverage their office package into a monopoly, and now are using their office package monopoly to illegally maintain their OS monopoly. Of course the numerous times that MS has been caught committing acts of piracy doesn't help with their image. The worst being when they used illegally copied code from Stacker to drive Stacker out of business.
While Google could turn out to be evil in the end, having a monopoly is neither evil nor illegal.
Not to rain on your parade, but not one of your links (although I didn't check out every hit on the Google search for obvious reasons) provided any evidence against the statement that the qwerty keyboard was designed to slow typists. Two only went so far as to say that it wasn't true, but didn't provide anything other than their word for us to believe it, and the third didn't even bring the subject up. It only discussed the merits of qwerty vs. Dvorak, and then mostly only through attempts to discrediting of the Dvorak studies.
What I can show you is that while I do believe, as I said, that hammer jamming was one reason for the layout, it is unlikely to be the only factor, as anyone that was placing key jamming as the only criteria would not put the 'T' and 'H' keys anywhere near each other.
So, Congratulations! You have just perpetuated an urban legend. (fill in your same links for for citation)
I strongly consider you to understand a modicum of research before you regurgitate knowledge you got at a party while partly intoxicated, and hoping to get that girl-in-the-green-dress' phone number.
Oh wait... do you get invited to those kinds of parties? Perhaps you think digital watches are a pretty cool idea?
After all, you seem to think that "nu-uh" dispells 'legends', and that linking to pages that don't even discuss the subject supports that.
When I first read your comment, I though you were just one of those people that just like to complain. Then I saw the video, and had to completely agree with you. The display shows little to no creativity, and seem to be just a "I bought more lights" display. We used to have a house here in Santa Rosa, Ca that had a big display every year. It had a tenth of the lights, and was dramatically more impressive. It had spinning carousels, elves making toys, and various other animated displays. Buying more lights isn't impressive. Show me something I haven't seen before if you want to impress me.
And if he owns his home, he would be smart to fix that, but the millions of renters in the US, the banning of incandecent bulbs will just means they are screwed. I just rented a house, and the CF bulbs in the living room dimming fixture makes the entire house go haywire. If the flickering lights in the living room isn't bad enough, it makes the night light in the bathroom actually buzz. I am not convinced that this is safe, and if it can make a nightlight buzz, what was it doing to the rest of the electronics in the house.
They guy that invented QWERTY did just fine. You are probably just missing his goal. The goal was to slow down typists. With a manual hammer type typewriter, typing too fast jams the machine. You need a way to make sure that 1) the most commonly used letters are farther away from each other, thus reducing the likelihood of jamming, and 2) slow the typist down enough that each hammer has time to retract before the next one comes up and jams it.
That necktie guy... Yeah, lets run him on Windows ME.
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"Most people are calling for some reasonable give and take"
That sounds reasonable. The problem is that reasonable give and take was established a very long time ago. The record labels are not asking for unreasonable give and take. Meeting me half way isn't reasonable if I've already traveled half way, and you are saying half way from where we are now.
Unless you have a heater in your house.
Hmmm... Makes you wonder if a degree could be used as a means to weed out the stupid...
None of those differences involve people who want a cheap system, being unwilling to pay for software.
The entire gaming console market would seem to disagree with you. That entire business model is based on the premise that you make almost no money on the hardware, and maybe even lose money on it, so that you can make a killing on all of the software that is sold for it.
Geeks who know more English know that "man" is a valid synonym for for "human".
OK, I'll admit that I don't know everything that this device might have been advertised to do, but my understanding is that it is an e-book reader. If that is the case, a built in tracking device that was not disclosed is WAY over the top in unacceptable behavior. Is it even legal to install tracking devices in peoples belongings without their knowledge? At the very least I would consider this stalking. Really, this is tin foil hat stuff. If people started complaining that they were being tracked by this device prior to it being proven it has tracking capabilities, everyone else would have thought the complainer was insane.
"Yes, a poor rural US school could use an XO, but you ignore the fact that if they can afford to buy a Classmate, then OLPC shouldn't give them anything."
This seems to be a point that many are confused about. Probably because they keep hearing about kids being 'given free laptops'. The OLPC is not giving laptops to anyone. They are selling laptops. This is because they are selling them to the government, and having the government give away the laptops. By doing this, they get the press of giving laptops away, when in fact they are selling them. So, if the poor rural US or 3rd world school can afford an XO, they likely can afford a Classmate.
"Just use the right tools for the job."
This gets said a lot, and PERHAPS Windows is the right tool for the job, but that is highly debatable. Just because nails will successfully hold a door closed, it doesn't mean that you want to use them instead of a standard door lock. My point is that using a tool that solves the problem today, but creates a lot more work and problems down the line, is not the right tool for the job. That being said, I definitely have not been sold on the Sugar interface that is being used on the OLPC. It seems to be different, just for the sake of being different.
I don't see why these moves against OLPC is a surprise to anyone. Just look at the design of the it. It was clearly designed as a way for various companies to trick other people into pay for their R&D by setting up a questionable charity. I still think the original $100 price tag is expensive for what they are claiming to try to accomplish. The $200 price tag is down right retail. Expect to see more stories about people and companies pulling out so that they can use the R&D that was paid for with donations in their regular business.
Now wait a minute. First you argue that vaccines won't catch on because people won't just take them, then you turn around and argue that people will take any vaccine the government tells them. Which is it?
That is because HPV will prevent someone from suffering ill effects caused by "immoral behavior", whereas a cocaine vaccine would prevent the "immoral behavior" itself. Now, if the HPV prevented people from enjoying sex, and thus reduced them to using it only for procreation, you would see a different landscape. Most of the people that are currently against it, would become for it, and many that are for it would become against it.
A better example is the Chicken Pox vaccine. It became 'required', and everyone went along with it. Even though it trades a major childhood inconvenience for a real risk of a deadly disease as an adult. I know very few parents that have even bothered to look at what they are allowing to be pumped into their kids. They are told that it is part of the standard vaccine package, and they go with it.
Any movie playing device that does not just start playing the movie when it is inserted is broken from design. Yes that includes DVD players. It makes absolutely no sense to bring up a feature (the menu) that will be needed .01% of the time, instead of the feature that will be used 99.99% of the time. This is particularly a poor design choice when the process of going from the 99.99% used feature to the .01% feature is the same as the other way around. The design of the DVD belongs in a UI hall of shame.
That would be fine because they would then ignore any names that are on the site. Thus if you wanted to check a domain, and didn't want it squatted, you submit it to the site, and the squatters ignore it. So, if the squatters filter on the contents of the site, your problem is still solved.
The trick is to set up a web site that supplies the list of domains to be searched. That way people could set up a small utility to automatically grab the list and search. This would indicate that lots of people are interested in the domain name. By making the lookups randomize over a week or two and randomizing the time that the search is done, the system would make it much more difficult to filter out.
Now, the squatters COULD start developing a list of IP addresses that are doing lookups, and filtering them out of their results. Of course, this would be all right as it would mean you were protected from someone sneaking in and squatting the name you looked up. Even if the squatters filtered on both IP address AND multiple hits, this could be resolved by allowing real name lookups to be submitted into the random name lookup web site. Then if you wanted to lookup ihatedomainnamesquatters.com, not only you but everyone else that has been looking up random names, will look up ihatedomainnamesquatters.com also. It would be virtually impossible to tell the difference between real interest, and fake.
Plus, if you wanted to both fund the site AND be ironic, you could put advertising on the web page.
This all comes down to whether the law sees this data as "YOUR data", or "data ABOUT YOU". I think the law should be written that says it is your data. Thus anyone that wants to use it has to get your permission to use it. If there is any kind of "Intellectual Property" that really exists, it is your personal information.
I agree that the modem not working is a problem. I also understand that it was probably a lot cheaper to get the board with the modem than without, and they may have hopes of adding a driver for the modem later. The obvious solution is that they should have put a plug in the modem that could not be removed with your fingers, but could be removed with a paperclip. This would have made the modem a non-issue on release. By putting a dummy driver package on the system by default, they could add the driver, and notify the user of both the added functionality, and how to remove the plug, through a update manager. No one would have complained, and lots of people would be ecstatic to turn on their computer one day and get a pop-up that has a picture and directions saying "Push a paper clip into 'this --->' hole in the back of your computer to remove the plug. This will activate your FREE modem upgrade!". A simple cheap piece of plastic would solved this problem.
Flash not being installed is not an issue. Flash has never been pre-installed on any system I have ever bought. It is neither a surprise, nor a disappointment that it is not installed on this machine. I agree that if a I would take back a Windows machine if the modem didn't work, so it is a shame that they didn't think about just plugging the hole. The resolution issue, much like the Flash issue, isn't an issue at all. Not having the highest resolution default is common in the Windows world was well when a computer doesn't come with a monitor. If anything, defaulting to a 1280 width is too high, as some of the people buying this computer will be using hand me monitors that may only go to 800x600.
So, I would say the only real flaw was the lack of a plastic plug in the modem.
"this is much more like racism."
This is the kind of comment that highlight one of the problems with dog owners. The vast majority of dog owners are insane. Not, wow, I can't believe he did that, insane. But, the kind of insane where they cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. This person actually used the word 'racism' when talking about dogs.
For all the borderline crazy people that are not too far gone. Dogs are not people.
Yes, lots of restaurants use pagers. Chili's and Outback come to mind, but I know that I have seen many more use it.
My first thought is, so what. Having a monopoly is not illegal. It is only illegal if you use it to control other markets. The illegal monopoly complaint against MS is not that they have the most popular OS, or the most popular Office package. It is that they previously used their monopoly in the OS market to illegally leverage their office package into a monopoly, and now are using their office package monopoly to illegally maintain their OS monopoly. Of course the numerous times that MS has been caught committing acts of piracy doesn't help with their image. The worst being when they used illegally copied code from Stacker to drive Stacker out of business.
While Google could turn out to be evil in the end, having a monopoly is neither evil nor illegal.
Or even a RAID, so you actually have to have degradation on 2 drives in the same place to lose any information.
Not to rain on your parade, but not one of your links (although I didn't check out every hit on the Google search for obvious reasons) provided any evidence against the statement that the qwerty keyboard was designed to slow typists. Two only went so far as to say that it wasn't true, but didn't provide anything other than their word for us to believe it, and the third didn't even bring the subject up. It only discussed the merits of qwerty vs. Dvorak, and then mostly only through attempts to discrediting of the Dvorak studies.
What I can show you is that while I do believe, as I said, that hammer jamming was one reason for the layout, it is unlikely to be the only factor, as anyone that was placing key jamming as the only criteria would not put the 'T' and 'H' keys anywhere near each other.
So, Congratulations! You have just perpetuated an urban legend. (fill in your same links for for citation)
I strongly consider you to understand a modicum of research before you regurgitate knowledge you got at a party while partly intoxicated, and hoping to get that girl-in-the-green-dress' phone number.
Oh wait... do you get invited to those kinds of parties? Perhaps you think digital watches are a pretty cool idea?
After all, you seem to think that "nu-uh" dispells 'legends', and that linking to pages that don't even discuss the subject supports that.
When I first read your comment, I though you were just one of those people that just like to complain. Then I saw the video, and had to completely agree with you. The display shows little to no creativity, and seem to be just a "I bought more lights" display. We used to have a house here in Santa Rosa, Ca that had a big display every year. It had a tenth of the lights, and was dramatically more impressive. It had spinning carousels, elves making toys, and various other animated displays. Buying more lights isn't impressive. Show me something I haven't seen before if you want to impress me.
And if he owns his home, he would be smart to fix that, but the millions of renters in the US, the banning of incandecent bulbs will just means they are screwed. I just rented a house, and the CF bulbs in the living room dimming fixture makes the entire house go haywire. If the flickering lights in the living room isn't bad enough, it makes the night light in the bathroom actually buzz. I am not convinced that this is safe, and if it can make a nightlight buzz, what was it doing to the rest of the electronics in the house.
A fine point sir. I am left with no argument to counter that.
They guy that invented QWERTY did just fine. You are probably just missing his goal. The goal was to slow down typists. With a manual hammer type typewriter, typing too fast jams the machine. You need a way to make sure that 1) the most commonly used letters are farther away from each other, thus reducing the likelihood of jamming, and 2) slow the typist down enough that each hammer has time to retract before the next one comes up and jams it.
That necktie guy... Yeah, lets run him on Windows ME.