I have to agree with you, KDE really feels more "light" each release. And if you use only "K" apps, the memory footprint is really small.
Pehaps now that KDE is heading for a major rewrite, the MIT folks may have the opportunity to get a stripped down version of KDE4.
On the other hand, Trolltech already provide a lightweight portable environment based on QT: QTopia. With the advantage that it doesn't deppends on X11, outputing graphics directly to the framebuffer.
Hummm... A bare-bones KDE, rendering directly to the frame-buffer, would be a nice candidate to power this MIT notebook.
I don't know if you're kidding or not... but you're right!
Windows98 is good enought, sure it can be unstable as hell... But if Microsoft donated the code, with some effort one could port it to run using Linux or BSD instead of DOS. Look at how far the Wine team has gone, I bet they could make Windows98 into a nice Desktop Environment!
While DSL is fine for the regular hacker, I dont know if a 10 year old will be confortable with it...
I guess that what Negroponte was really trying to say is: "KDE an GNOME are too fat for a 500MHz computer with 128MB RAM and only 512MB of storage". And, lets face it, hes right.
Now, this raises a really good point. If he, or someone else, manages to fit a full desktop environment within this U$100 Notebook specs, Ill be using it on my desktop too!
Not that I dont like KDE or GNOME, quite the contrary, I found them better than Windows in many ways... But they just have grown fat, I remember being able to run KDE2 on a Pentium 166 MMX with 46MB RAM! And even back then, KDE was pretty capable... much more than Windows95 for example.
Of course now we have much better computers, and the programmers are just using this extra computer power and memory that otherwise would be wasted... But it wouldn't be cool if we managed to build a full featured desktop environment without depending on so much power? Because if we manage to do so, there will be much more remaining cpu cycles to waste with eye candy:-)
I think that it would make a lot more sense for Apple to help the GNUStep project to be 100% compatible with MacOSX APIS, or simply release their on APIs under an Open Licence.
XCode is a nice IDE, and Objective C is a sweet programming language... it only lacks cross platform support. If Adobe could use the same codebase to cross compile to MacOSX, Windows and Linux the universal binary for Photoshop woudn't take so long! Lots of software houses fall in this same category, they have to mantain two or three separated teams to code Windows, MacOSX and Linux versions of their applications!
If Apple port their APIs and frameworks, so they work under Windows and Linux(and possibly every other X11 environment), Macs would became the first choice among those who need to deploy their applications to diferent OSes.
We could ask Bush to paint the entire Irak country plain white as well. It would reflect a lot of sun radiation back to space, and promote peace!!! Also the terrorists, using their black hoods and camouflage pants, would become very easy to find!
I really don't think that starving populations are the target of this $100 notebook.
For example, Negroponte offered this project to Brazil, and as a brazilian I can state that there is no widespread hunger here. I think that they're targeting poor people, not miserable people.
You people keep on talking about Africa, but there are poor people at the so called "first world" too. We all could see that when the newspapers around the world show what happened to New Orleans, an how hundreds, if not thousands, of POOR people looked for shelter under bridges while they waited for aid. It looked like Haiti, really.
USA should embrace this project, not to help poor children around the world, but to help their own children! It would cost a lot less than "the war aggainst terror", and do much more good.
Intel --> Afraid of people finding that a much cheaper, low spec machine can get the job done. Microsoft --> Afraid of people finding that a free operating sistem, and free apps can get the job done on a cheaper, low spec machine.
I do all my paperwork on Abiword and Gnumeric running on my old and busted P3 700MHz laptop, with just 128MB of RAM. And I think the MIT Laptop is more than capable of running this two applications.
Well, for one it doesn't need to start as a store!
Look at Google Video, they sell videos there but the amount of free content surpass by a great margin the paid content. It would be great to have a "Google Music" search engine, to be able to quickly find free music! It would be great for artists and small record labels too, because they would have a free, no-strings-attached, distribution channel for their songs. And if Google comes up with something like PayPal you have a music distribuition model that puts the money directly in the artist's pockets, instead of RIAA's.
And I don't think they'll need any form of DRM. Without having to pay RIAA, the gross proffit will be handed directly to artists and Google, so they'll be able to pratice lower prices than ITMS. And with sufficient lower prices fewer people will trouble themselves into stealing music. Also, I guess many artists will give their music away for free anyways, because they make the real money from their live performances, and what they really want is some good way to promote their work.
On a side note... a "Google Music" service would be really a hit if they make a public API to interface with it, this way apps like Amarok, WinAmp, RythmBox and others would download and search music directly from it!!!
Microsoft won't top VMWare unless they release a Linux version of both Server and Client.
While it may be nice to run Linux inside Windows, as a development or test sandbox, running several mission-critial services virtualized inside a Windows Box sounds like non-sense to me.
You get far more performance from SMP sistems, more stability and a safer environment with Linux! VMare is perfect to secure that legacy Exchange, Active Domain or MS SQL server... But why, save for development or testing, would you run an Apache, OpenLDAP or PostFix server virtualized inside a Windows box!?!?!
Now, when VMare will release a MacOSX version of their free player?
Actuallyy I user MP3 because today it is the most supported file format out there. And I don't want to re-rip or re-encode my entire CD collection every time I buy a new device!
By the way, I don't own a iPod either. I have a SanDisk Sansa e130, it has a nice SD socket, so I can upgrade it's capacity up to 2GB:-D
Does the developing nations need computers? Maybe... Does the children at these nations need computers? Pehaps... Does they need better EDUCATIONAL and WEALTH DIVISION policies? You can bet it!
I live at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And I can tell you that most of the children here already has acces to computers. But they don't use them to study, they prefer to user them to play Counter-Strike.
Distribute free computers among the poor populations, and dump them at public schools has NO USE when the average teacher is underpaid... When there arent enought schools... When there is no social programs to make sure the children stay at school... When lots of children go to the local drug dealers to make money, because their mother are unenployed... When these children has a drunken dad, or no dad at all!
Don't get me wrong. I think that it would be fantastic if every children here at Rio de Janeiro, or at Brazil, has access to a computer. But the problem is, nobody is thinking what these children will do with these computers! How they fit within the current brazilian school model?
Computers are not the priority right now. And I gues this is the same situation on every other developing nation. Lets get the basic stuff first, like EDUCATION, and JOBS, and HOUSING... Then the governaments can start giving away free computers to garantee some more votes on the next election.
A tablet device will also be unexpected and underwhelming. Who would buy a tablet device? Students. But any tablet device from Apple will be too expensive for most students to afford, and it will be a novelty item for many non-students.
I would,
A TabletPC equiped with Photoshop or Corel Painter is a true digital canvas. As an owner of a Wacom Tablet, I can tell you that draw directly on the screen offers a much better experience.
Right now professional artists are limited to Windows solutions when it comes to TabletPCs, so many of them buy notebooks from other vendors because Apple doesnt offer a solution!
And mind you that this doesn't need to be a entirelly new product, Apple might incorporate the tablet hardware into their existing notebooks. I'd love to see an Tablet iBook:-)
Taking a look at the new revolution specs, you can see that it's just a GameCube with a faster processor, and a new video hardware. It seems to be the same overall architeture used on the GC, the fact that reports say that the early devellopment kits were overclocked GameCube consoles seems to confirm that.
Now, the Gekko processor was much the same as an G3 processor, the same used on those old colorfull iMacs. G3 processors, AFAIK, can now go up to little above 1GHz... So Nintendo can create at least one more generation of consoles using this processor, and after that they can demand a G4 clone from IBM, and gain extra float point performance from VMX/Altivec.
When first introduced, the CG Flipper GPU was told to be a little better than a ATI RADEON 7500, IRC. Let's guess that the Revolution GPU is somewhat better than a RADEON 9600. Now, that leaves Nintendo with a nice upgrade path for the GPU as well.
Nintendo doesn't need to expend trillions of money on R&D to come up with a new processor and GPU architeture for each new console they create, IBM and ATI already did it for them, and for at least two more generations!
No wonder why Nintendo can build cheaper consoles, and still make a profit from them...
While Google doesn't directly pay for Apache, it employs some developers that work on Apache code... I think that this is a valid form to support an OSS project.
I'm not an Artificial Intelligence scientist, but I was thinking...
If they can simulate a virus, they can extract and understand the basic functions of their self-replicant nature. A self-replicant, adaptable piece of code might not sound that much, but I guess once it became bigger (by replicating itself), and more complex (with lots of mutated code), it can help us to better understand the paths to true AI.
I don't think that computer virii are that different from their biological counter parts... after all they share the same common objective, replicate and spread as much as they can. The only real difference is that computer virus is not capable of self adaptation, a MSOffice Macro virus can't mutate to exploit a IE vulnerability unless someone re-program it to do so, it lack the intelligence.
So, I think once we understand how to make a computer virus adapt itself to infect different "hosts", we'll be able to devellop some serious AI.
The only useful part about that one is that I think Outlook 2003 has vastly improved design against worms and spam.
If you need security, why not use OpenOffice? You don't need to uninstall MSOffice, keep it if you have any document that OpenOffice can't handle, but use Impress to open those PPT and PPS that you receive by email.
MSOffice vulnerabilities means nothing to OpenOffice, and I'm yet to see a Macro Virus that works on it. Also, it handles corrupt files much better than MSOffice, while Word hangs Writter will faithfully open almost anything that you throw at it.
I bet that you'll find yourself using OpenOffice more and more, and one day you'll be confident enought to uninstall MSOffice from your computer. And as your co-workers see you safely opening suspect files, and recovering otherwise unrecoverable documents they'll want to check OpenOffice as well.
That's how I convinced my mother to switch, she is a lawyer and almost lost her PhD. thesis because of a corrupt file that MSWord couldnt open... So I installed OpenOffice, and it opened flawlessly.;-)
While I agree that Revolution may not have enougth power to propely emulate DreamCast games, there's still a chance that someone release a PSONE emulator for it!
Mozilla took the XUL path, but that won't work for cross-browser applications.
I like to think that someday Mozilla will release a XUL plugin that will fix that. And actually there is alredy something on the way, take a look at XUL Runner for example.
From the site:
XULRunner is a single installable package that can be used to bootstrap multiple XUL+XPCOM applications that are as rich as Firefox and Thunderbird.
So, yes... I can picture a future where XUL has replaced all this AJAX stuff.
Personally, I think the -government- should be required to produce a generic "C" program or web page that calculates your taxes according to the tax code and if it is wrong, you only pay interest- no penalties. Tax collection is a government function- it's insane that we have these huge industries built around calculating your taxes.
I'd like to point out that the brazilian governament offers a free (as in beer) program to calculate our taxes, and deliver them using the internet. It comes in two flavors: a Windows only version, and a Java version for Linux, Mac and any other OS that have a compilant J2RE1.4.
IRC, this software won the Duke Awards some time ago.
So, at least here at Brazil, we don't have to worry about the lack of tax software.
I'm serious, nowdays a PS2 offers a much better experience than a computer. And you can even use them to do a LAN Party.
I admit that some titles work much better on a computer, such as FPS' and Strategy games. But the PS2 come with 2 USB ports, and it's just a matter of time until some figure out a way to support mouse and keyboard with their titles.
Thats ok, sometimes I like to thinker too and understand how things work at the core level, but when you do that you waste too many time doing things that already has been made, and thats not cool when youre working serious project.
Rails is about speed, is about getting your job done in less time, with less effort.
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Using a Compact Flash card instead of a Hard Disk. There are IDE interfaces that will allow you to plug a CF card and use it as an IDE device.
I have to agree with you, KDE really feels more "light" each release. And if you use only "K" apps, the memory footprint is really small.
Pehaps now that KDE is heading for a major rewrite, the MIT folks may have the opportunity to get a stripped down version of KDE4.
On the other hand, Trolltech already provide a lightweight portable environment based on QT: QTopia. With the advantage that it doesn't deppends on X11, outputing graphics directly to the framebuffer.
Hummm... A bare-bones KDE, rendering directly to the frame-buffer, would be a nice candidate to power this MIT notebook.
I don't know if you're kidding or not... but you're right!
Windows98 is good enought, sure it can be unstable as hell... But if Microsoft donated the code, with some effort one could port it to run using Linux or BSD instead of DOS. Look at how far the Wine team has gone, I bet they could make Windows98 into a nice Desktop Environment!
=D
While DSL is fine for the regular hacker, I dont know if a 10 year old will be confortable with it...
:-)
I guess that what Negroponte was really trying to say is: "KDE an GNOME are too fat for a 500MHz computer with 128MB RAM and only 512MB of storage". And, lets face it, hes right.
Now, this raises a really good point. If he, or someone else, manages to fit a full desktop environment within this U$100 Notebook specs, Ill be using it on my desktop too!
Not that I dont like KDE or GNOME, quite the contrary, I found them better than Windows in many ways... But they just have grown fat, I remember being able to run KDE2 on a Pentium 166 MMX with 46MB RAM! And even back then, KDE was pretty capable... much more than Windows95 for example.
Of course now we have much better computers, and the programmers are just using this extra computer power and memory that otherwise would be wasted... But it wouldn't be cool if we managed to build a full featured desktop environment without depending on so much power? Because if we manage to do so, there will be much more remaining cpu cycles to waste with eye candy
Just my $0,02
I don't know...
I think that it would make a lot more sense for Apple to help the GNUStep project to be 100% compatible with MacOSX APIS, or simply release their on APIs under an Open Licence.
XCode is a nice IDE, and Objective C is a sweet programming language... it only lacks cross platform support. If Adobe could use the same codebase to cross compile to MacOSX, Windows and Linux the universal binary for Photoshop woudn't take so long! Lots of software houses fall in this same category, they have to mantain two or three separated teams to code Windows, MacOSX and Linux versions of their applications!
If Apple port their APIs and frameworks, so they work under Windows and Linux(and possibly every other X11 environment), Macs would became the first choice among those who need to deploy their applications to diferent OSes.
We could ask Bush to paint the entire Irak country plain white as well. It would reflect a lot of sun radiation back to space, and promote peace!!! Also the terrorists, using their black hoods and camouflage pants, would become very easy to find!
I really don't think that starving populations are the target of this $100 notebook.
For example, Negroponte offered this project to Brazil, and as a brazilian I can state that there is no widespread hunger here. I think that they're targeting poor people, not miserable people.
You people keep on talking about Africa, but there are poor people at the so called "first world" too. We all could see that when the newspapers around the world show what happened to New Orleans, an how hundreds, if not thousands, of POOR people looked for shelter under bridges while they waited for aid. It looked like Haiti, really.
USA should embrace this project, not to help poor children around the world, but to help their own children! It would cost a lot less than "the war aggainst terror", and do much more good.
My guess:
Intel --> Afraid of people finding that a much cheaper, low spec machine can get the job done.
Microsoft --> Afraid of people finding that a free operating sistem, and free apps can get the job done on a cheaper, low spec machine.
I do all my paperwork on Abiword and Gnumeric running on my old and busted P3 700MHz laptop, with just 128MB of RAM. And I think the MIT Laptop is more than capable of running this two applications.
Well, for one it doesn't need to start as a store!
Look at Google Video, they sell videos there but the amount of free content surpass by a great margin the paid content. It would be great to have a "Google Music" search engine, to be able to quickly find free music! It would be great for artists and small record labels too, because they would have a free, no-strings-attached, distribution channel for their songs. And if Google comes up with something like PayPal you have a music distribuition model that puts the money directly in the artist's pockets, instead of RIAA's.
And I don't think they'll need any form of DRM. Without having to pay RIAA, the gross proffit will be handed directly to artists and Google, so they'll be able to pratice lower prices than ITMS. And with sufficient lower prices fewer people will trouble themselves into stealing music. Also, I guess many artists will give their music away for free anyways, because they make the real money from their live performances, and what they really want is some good way to promote their work.
On a side note... a "Google Music" service would be really a hit if they make a public API to interface with it, this way apps like Amarok, WinAmp, RythmBox and others would download and search music directly from it!!!
Microsoft won't top VMWare unless they release a Linux version of both Server and Client.
While it may be nice to run Linux inside Windows, as a development or test sandbox, running several mission-critial services virtualized inside a Windows Box sounds like non-sense to me.
You get far more performance from SMP sistems, more stability and a safer environment with Linux! VMare is perfect to secure that legacy Exchange, Active Domain or MS SQL server... But why, save for development or testing, would you run an Apache, OpenLDAP or PostFix server virtualized inside a Windows box!?!?!
Now, when VMare will release a MacOSX version of their free player?
Actuallyy I user MP3 because today it is the most supported file format out there. And I don't want to re-rip or re-encode my entire CD collection every time I buy a new device!
:-D
By the way, I don't own a iPod either. I have a SanDisk Sansa e130, it has a nice SD socket, so I can upgrade it's capacity up to 2GB
Does the developing nations need computers? Maybe...
Does the children at these nations need computers? Pehaps...
Does they need better EDUCATIONAL and WEALTH DIVISION policies? You can bet it!
I live at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. And I can tell you that most of the children here already has acces to computers. But they don't use them to study, they prefer to user them to play Counter-Strike.
Distribute free computers among the poor populations, and dump them at public schools has NO USE when the average teacher is underpaid... When there arent enought schools... When there is no social programs to make sure the children stay at school... When lots of children go to the local drug dealers to make money, because their mother are unenployed... When these children has a drunken dad, or no dad at all!
Don't get me wrong. I think that it would be fantastic if every children here at Rio de Janeiro, or at Brazil, has access to a computer. But the problem is, nobody is thinking what these children will do with these computers! How they fit within the current brazilian school model?
Computers are not the priority right now. And I gues this is the same situation on every other developing nation. Lets get the basic stuff first, like EDUCATION, and JOBS, and HOUSING... Then the governaments can start giving away free computers to garantee some more votes on the next election.
Just my $0.02
Because of another proprietary format...
Of course you can tell me that Apple has AAC, but its not a proprietary format, and the iPod and iTunes can play all of your MP3 files.
I would,
A TabletPC equiped with Photoshop or Corel Painter is a true digital canvas. As an owner of a Wacom Tablet, I can tell you that draw directly on the screen offers a much better experience.
Right now professional artists are limited to Windows solutions when it comes to TabletPCs, so many of them buy notebooks from other vendors because Apple doesnt offer a solution!
And mind you that this doesn't need to be a entirelly new product, Apple might incorporate the tablet hardware into their existing notebooks. I'd love to see an Tablet iBook
Wow, Nintendo got it right!
Taking a look at the new revolution specs, you can see that it's just a GameCube with a faster processor, and a new video hardware. It seems to be the same overall architeture used on the GC, the fact that reports say that the early devellopment kits were overclocked GameCube consoles seems to confirm that.
Now, the Gekko processor was much the same as an G3 processor, the same used on those old colorfull iMacs. G3 processors, AFAIK, can now go up to little above 1GHz... So Nintendo can create at least one more generation of consoles using this processor, and after that they can demand a G4 clone from IBM, and gain extra float point performance from VMX/Altivec.
When first introduced, the CG Flipper GPU was told to be a little better than a ATI RADEON 7500, IRC. Let's guess that the Revolution GPU is somewhat better than a RADEON 9600. Now, that leaves Nintendo with a nice upgrade path for the GPU as well.
Nintendo doesn't need to expend trillions of money on R&D to come up with a new processor and GPU architeture for each new console they create, IBM and ATI already did it for them, and for at least two more generations!
No wonder why Nintendo can build cheaper consoles, and still make a profit from them...
While Google doesn't directly pay for Apache, it employs some developers that work on Apache code... I think that this is a valid form to support an OSS project.
I'm not an Artificial Intelligence scientist, but I was thinking...
If they can simulate a virus, they can extract and understand the basic functions of their self-replicant nature. A self-replicant, adaptable piece of code might not sound that much, but I guess once it became bigger (by replicating itself), and more complex (with lots of mutated code), it can help us to better understand the paths to true AI.
I don't think that computer virii are that different from their biological counter parts... after all they share the same common objective, replicate and spread as much as they can. The only real difference is that computer virus is not capable of self adaptation, a MSOffice Macro virus can't mutate to exploit a IE vulnerability unless someone re-program it to do so, it lack the intelligence.
So, I think once we understand how to make a computer virus adapt itself to infect different "hosts", we'll be able to devellop some serious AI.
Just my $0,02
If you need security, why not use OpenOffice? You don't need to uninstall MSOffice, keep it if you have any document that OpenOffice can't handle, but use Impress to open those PPT and PPS that you receive by email.
MSOffice vulnerabilities means nothing to OpenOffice, and I'm yet to see a Macro Virus that works on it. Also, it handles corrupt files much better than MSOffice, while Word hangs Writter will faithfully open almost anything that you throw at it.
I bet that you'll find yourself using OpenOffice more and more, and one day you'll be confident enought to uninstall MSOffice from your computer. And as your co-workers see you safely opening suspect files, and recovering otherwise unrecoverable documents they'll want to check OpenOffice as well.
That's how I convinced my mother to switch, she is a lawyer and almost lost her PhD. thesis because of a corrupt file that MSWord couldnt open... So I installed OpenOffice, and it opened flawlessly.
While I agree that Revolution may not have enougth power to propely emulate DreamCast games, there's still a chance that someone release a PSONE emulator for it!
There is already one filesystem that try to address this issues, is the JFFS. Its used by the Familiar Linux distribution, aimed at iPaq handhelds.
From the site:
So, yes... I can picture a future where XUL has replaced all this AJAX stuff.IRC, this software won the Duke Awards some time ago.
So, at least here at Brazil, we don't have to worry about the lack of tax software.
Well,
If they got the name JOGA from the portuguese verb JOGAR (== to play), you can say JOH-GA, with an very open sound.
Buy a video game console!
I'm serious, nowdays a PS2 offers a much better experience than a computer. And you can even use them to do a LAN Party.
I admit that some titles work much better on a computer, such as FPS' and Strategy games. But the PS2 come with 2 USB ports, and it's just a matter of time until some figure out a way to support mouse and keyboard with their titles.
So, you like to re-invent the weel.
Thats ok, sometimes I like to thinker too and understand how things work at the core level, but when you do that you waste too many time doing things that already has been made, and thats not cool when youre working serious project.
Rails is about speed, is about getting your job done in less time, with less effort.