When robots become the rule, and not the exception, what kind of impact it will cause to our society?
Just imagine fully automated factory, that can operate by itself with little, or no human intervention. Now imagine robots smart enough to interpret a building plant, prepare the building site, and build everything almost on their own. Entire farms being operated from a single computer console...
Now imagine a world where nobody will have to clean a toilet, or make Big Macs, or sweep the floor.
How far we are from the day that this will become a reality? What will happen to the people that depend on these less qualified jobs to survive? This will bring an end to the hunger and poverty, or it will just worsen the social problems we already have?
I have been a Claro customer for 3 years now, used to own a Siemens MC60 and didn't use it as a GPRS modem only because the darned thing refused to keep the connection alive under Linux. Now I own a Sony-Ericsson z530i, and I can even browse it's filesystem using irda/OBEX on KDE.
Re:Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
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· Score: 4, Informative
It must be a US only problem then...
Around here at Brazil I'm able to upload and download photos/ringtones to my mobile using the provided data-cable, no fees attached. Also there are tons of phones with IR or Bluetooth conectivity, you can use both to transfer data to these phones. Not to mention the new phones that have expandable memory using SDCards and MemorySticks...
So, the only people that pays for things like picture downloading and ringtones here are the ones that don't know better, that is, most of them:-) But no carrier is forcing them to pay for anything, they're paying because they just don't know that there are ways to get the same things for free.
The problem is that MacOSX has this "Application Folder" concept, so you can just browse to/Apps in your filesystem and find all of your applications by their name and icon... try doing the same with any Linux distro/usr/bin.
To be able to provide the same simplicity we must change the current layout of the Linux filesystem, I know at least one Linux distro that have done this: GOBO Linux.
Gobo use a rather radical approach to the problem, where every application goes under the/Apps folder. MacOSX for instance only keeps the "userland" applications there.
Acess has a Linux PDA platform ready, using X11, GTK and GStreamer... Yet, on their site there's not ONE device running it!
Nokia makes a sweet PDA/Webpad... but they don't market it worldwide. And it's almost impossible to get one here at Brazil.
Sharp had the Zaurus, but they never quite leaved the asian market.
And there were other short-lived Linux based PDAs, and yet none lasted:-(
Come on Palm! PalmOS should be dead and burried by now... How hard can it be to move to a better OS? Access has it, Trolltech has it, just pick one dammit!!!
The inconsistence between the two major implementations, Mozilla and IE. And the huge amount of annoying bugs that IE has.
I don't hate JS, its a rather nice language, but I tend to keep minimal use of it on my applications because I really hate to lost one entire day fighting against IE.
Yes, I know is possible to separate the application logic from the view on ASP and PHP, but most of the time people just cram the pages with code, making it illegible. Also, bad PHP and ASP programmers tend to use global variables for everything, making you wonder where that little guy named connSQL3_spaz4 came from.
A friend of mine told me once that: "PHP is the VisualBasic of OpenSource"... I couldn't agree more.
This is a major hit, and probably will boost PC and XBox game development. But, can it mean the end of Linux gaming? XNA will be the way to go for most development houses out there, and AFAIK it depends on Vista-only features... so probably Cedega/WineX won't help us.
So, can Linux gaming have any hope of survival? I guess so, it looks like Microsoft wants C# to be the official language for game development, and we already have Mono, so in theory one could wrap the XNA API around SDL, ALSA, etc... to provide a compatibility layer for playing, and developing, games on Linux/BSD/MacOSX.
The sad thing is... by using.NET, this XNA thing could be "The One Cross Platform Gaming SDK"(TM), write once play everywhere! Unfortunately it's Microsoft we're talking about, and they'll do everything to tie this tightly to Vista...
I can point other HUGE problem regarding Windows on OLPC:
- Lack of OPEN developer tools
If OLPC ships with Windows, any potential developer will be forced to use Microsoft tools... and it means being forced to Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio.
IIRC Steve Jobs offered MacOSX to Negroponte, and he refused it unless Acqua and Coccoa could be made OpenSource. Because otherwise developers would be tied to MacOSX and XCode.
Today OLPC runs Linux, true. But Sugar(OLPC interface and SDK) it's nothing more than GTK+Python, both free and avaliable on every major Desktop OS out there. It may be easier to kickstart the development on Linux, but nothing stops you from using Windows, MacOSX or *BSD to develop for it.
OLPC is a community project, and it needs the community to be able to succeed. This means developers too, closed tools or tools that are tied to one specific platform limit who can contribute to the project with code.
But the real question is why has Linux got so bloated ?
I don't think Linux is "bloated", not for our current desktops. The main issue is that now we are used to run lots of programs, and leave them running, so we need more memory. Also we use higher resolutions, with a higher color depth... that's consumes more memory too.
KDE 3.5 running at 800x600 8bit, with only one application running at time will run just fine on an old PC with 128MB RAM... You can even open one or two Konqueror windows without noticing any slowdowns. But don't expect being able run Firefox or OpenOffice.org without lots of swapping.
The same thing happened back in the Win9X days... How many of you had a machine capable of running Word97 and several IExplorer instances without lots of swapping?
Sure, maybe Thailand need to organize their education system first... But look at Brazil, where I live, we already have a quite well organized educational system, it has been forgotten, but it seems that it's on our government agenda again.
Here we have the same educational program across all public schools, the government distributes free textbooks for the children, and most of the teachers come from public schools. Of course there are problems, like underpaid teachers and unequipped schools, but if we can trust the news these are going to be addressed as well.
So Brazil is ready for the OLPC, more than that, we NEED something like OLPC. There's already computers being sold with Linux, they have tax reductions under the "Computador Popular" program, that hope to make computers accessible for more people. Linux is well known around here, even among computer illiterate... and there's lots of active user groups.
Theres lots of OpenSource efforts within the governament also, the main government site uses ZOPE/PLONE (www.brasil.gov.br)! And probably I'm one of the few here at Slashdot that can brag about being able to do my taxes on Linux!
Now, if we only could get something like OLPC for small business... that would be a hit around here too!
Don't forget that the Romans used SLAVES to do all the hard-work. Actually, it probably was the civilization that most relied on slavery. So while the Roman Democracy was a good thing for the Roman citizens, it was VERY bad for everybody else.
I agree that the Greek, and then the Roman Democracy are the greatest legacy of the western cultures... But it worked only for a minority, and at the cost of the suffering and hard work of many, many people.
Actually Christianity is a general term for the group of people that follow Jesus. There are several Christian religions, you just can't put all of them in the same pack! Maybe in the USA there's only the Catholics and the Protestants... but even among these two there is a lot of difference on their beliefs.
And elsewhere in the world there's even more Christian religions! For example, here at Brazil we have Umbanda[1] and Candomblé[2], two Christian religions that mix the Catholic and African traditions, and that have some aspects in common with the more scholar and scientific oriented Kardecist Spiritualism[3][4]. Can you say that people that follow these beliefs are more or less "true Christians" than the others?
So, to answer your question... I think you can't say there's something like a "true Christian", you are one or not, you believe or don't[5].
...or anybody else looked at the title and wondered about a printed version of "Yahoo! News" bundled on local newspapers? Or better, subscript to the sections you like the most, and receive a personalized newspaper at home, every day!
I mean, patents on software are invalid elsewhere, as far as I know.
Also, If there's something in the kernel code that Microsoft can claim as a patent breach, I guess there's lot more on the Solaris Kernel... It would be easy for Sun to claim that as Linux is a closer relative to Solaris, and relate the "patented code" to analogous code on Solaris, code that doesn't belongs to MSFT. IBM could do this with their AIX too...
This MSFT FUD is just ridiculous, and I really doubt that they will risk any real move. Mainly because they can't afford to loose this one at the court... it's their last resort against Linux. If the judge decides that Linux doesn't infringes any patent, it will be one barrier less to its adoption.
It's focused on team play, a team of players can have much more success than someone playing solo. And there's the SideKicking/Exemplar system, where the player level can be raised or lowered, so he can always join a team and have fun.
Also, economy isn't really a key factor on the game, in the end the combination of powers is what really mater.
If it fires at you by accident, you'll end with a few bruises and tearing eyes, nothing more. It can be useful to protect borders, and other large areas that demand lots of people to patrol.
You can get close to this by installing OpenOffice Calc, MySQL, and hooking the two together. It's not as simple as to create an empty spreadsheet file, but it's doable even by the average user if you teach him.
But, I don't think most users out there needs, or understands, the relational system that governs modern databases. Of course it would be nice to see OpenOffice as a nicely integrated frontent to MySQL (or Postgres, or Firebird, etc...).
And on the closed source front... if people are willing to pay, why give it for free?
We used Firebird on a project called "Remédio em Casa" (Medicine at Home), for the Rio de Janeiro city Health Department. People suffering from a heart condition or diabetes would come to a public hospital, get their diagnoses, an then receive medicine for 3 months of treatment at their homes, by mail.
The patient data is sent to a Java Servlet by a Delphi desktop Application, the medical subscript data is sent to the Post Office along with the patient address, and everything was stored on a Firebird database running on Debian Linux.
Last time I was involved with the project, we had a 3GB database, with over 270 thousand people attended... Somebody from the brazilian Firebird user Group told us that this was the largest Firebird database in operation at Brasil:-)
I can only tell good things about Firebird. It has a straight forward command line interface, its easy to manage, backup and restore, and has an excellent performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link!
:-)
It's a very good work indeed
When robots become the rule, and not the exception, what kind of impact it will cause to our society?
Just imagine fully automated factory, that can operate by itself with little, or no human intervention. Now imagine robots smart enough to interpret a building plant, prepare the building site, and build everything almost on their own. Entire farms being operated from a single computer console...
Now imagine a world where nobody will have to clean a toilet, or make Big Macs, or sweep the floor.
How far we are from the day that this will become a reality? What will happen to the people that depend on these less qualified jobs to survive? This will bring an end to the hunger and poverty, or it will just worsen the social problems we already have?
I didn't know about VIVO,
I have been a Claro customer for 3 years now, used to own a Siemens MC60 and didn't use it as a GPRS modem only because the darned thing refused to keep the connection alive under Linux. Now I own a Sony-Ericsson z530i, and I can even browse it's filesystem using irda/OBEX on KDE.
It must be a US only problem then...
:-) But no carrier is forcing them to pay for anything, they're paying because they just don't know that there are ways to get the same things for free.
Around here at Brazil I'm able to upload and download photos/ringtones to my mobile using the provided data-cable, no fees attached. Also there are tons of phones with IR or Bluetooth conectivity, you can use both to transfer data to these phones. Not to mention the new phones that have expandable memory using SDCards and MemorySticks...
So, the only people that pays for things like picture downloading and ringtones here are the ones that don't know better, that is, most of them
Well,
/Apps in your filesystem and find all of your applications by their name and icon... try doing the same with any Linux distro /usr/bin.
/Apps folder. MacOSX for instance only keeps the "userland" applications there.
The problem is that MacOSX has this "Application Folder" concept, so you can just browse to
To be able to provide the same simplicity we must change the current layout of the Linux filesystem, I know at least one Linux distro that have done this: GOBO Linux.
Gobo use a rather radical approach to the problem, where every application goes under the
Acess has a Linux PDA platform ready, using X11, GTK and GStreamer... Yet, on their site there's not ONE device running it!
:-(
Nokia makes a sweet PDA/Webpad... but they don't market it worldwide. And it's almost impossible to get one here at Brazil.
Sharp had the Zaurus, but they never quite leaved the asian market.
And there were other short-lived Linux based PDAs, and yet none lasted
Come on Palm! PalmOS should be dead and burried by now... How hard can it be to move to a better OS? Access has it, Trolltech has it, just pick one dammit!!!
The inconsistence between the two major implementations, Mozilla and IE. And the huge amount of annoying bugs that IE has.
I don't hate JS, its a rather nice language, but I tend to keep minimal use of it on my applications because I really hate to lost one entire day fighting against IE.
Both mix code with the view layer.
Yes, I know is possible to separate the application logic from the view on ASP and PHP, but most of the time people just cram the pages with code, making it illegible. Also, bad PHP and ASP programmers tend to use global variables for everything, making you wonder where that little guy named connSQL3_spaz4 came from.
A friend of mine told me once that: "PHP is the VisualBasic of OpenSource"... I couldn't agree more.
Agreed,
.NET, this XNA thing could be "The One Cross Platform Gaming SDK"(TM), write once play everywhere! Unfortunately it's Microsoft we're talking about, and they'll do everything to tie this tightly to Vista...
This is a major hit, and probably will boost PC and XBox game development. But, can it mean the end of Linux gaming? XNA will be the way to go for most development houses out there, and AFAIK it depends on Vista-only features... so probably Cedega/WineX won't help us.
So, can Linux gaming have any hope of survival? I guess so, it looks like Microsoft wants C# to be the official language for game development, and we already have Mono, so in theory one could wrap the XNA API around SDL, ALSA, etc... to provide a compatibility layer for playing, and developing, games on Linux/BSD/MacOSX.
The sad thing is... by using
I can point other HUGE problem regarding Windows on OLPC:
- Lack of OPEN developer tools
If OLPC ships with Windows, any potential developer will be forced to use Microsoft tools... and it means being forced to Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio.
IIRC Steve Jobs offered MacOSX to Negroponte, and he refused it unless Acqua and Coccoa could be made OpenSource. Because otherwise developers would be tied to MacOSX and XCode.
Today OLPC runs Linux, true. But Sugar(OLPC interface and SDK) it's nothing more than GTK+Python, both free and avaliable on every major Desktop OS out there. It may be easier to kickstart the development on Linux, but nothing stops you from using Windows, MacOSX or *BSD to develop for it.
OLPC is a community project, and it needs the community to be able to succeed. This means developers too, closed tools or tools that are tied to one specific platform limit who can contribute to the project with code.
Just my $0.02
I don't think Linux is "bloated", not for our current desktops. The main issue is that now we are used to run lots of programs, and leave them running, so we need more memory. Also we use higher resolutions, with a higher color depth... that's consumes more memory too.
KDE 3.5 running at 800x600 8bit, with only one application running at time will run just fine on an old PC with 128MB RAM... You can even open one or two Konqueror windows without noticing any slowdowns. But don't expect being able run Firefox or OpenOffice.org without lots of swapping.
The same thing happened back in the Win9X days... How many of you had a machine capable of running Word97 and several IExplorer instances without lots of swapping?
I don't see as a failure, because it isn't.
Sure, maybe Thailand need to organize their education system first... But look at Brazil, where I live, we already have a quite well organized educational system, it has been forgotten, but it seems that it's on our government agenda again.
Here we have the same educational program across all public schools, the government distributes free textbooks for the children, and most of the teachers come from public schools. Of course there are problems, like underpaid teachers and unequipped schools, but if we can trust the news these are going to be addressed as well.
So Brazil is ready for the OLPC, more than that, we NEED something like OLPC. There's already computers being sold with Linux, they have tax reductions under the "Computador Popular" program, that hope to make computers accessible for more people. Linux is well known around here, even among computer illiterate... and there's lots of active user groups.
Theres lots of OpenSource efforts within the governament also, the main government site uses ZOPE/PLONE (www.brasil.gov.br)! And probably I'm one of the few here at Slashdot that can brag about being able to do my taxes on Linux!
Now, if we only could get something like OLPC for small business... that would be a hit around here too!
Not only this, but these people CAN vote. Slaves didn't have this luck, and responsability.
Slaves don't choose their masters, we do.
Hey,
Don't forget that the Romans used SLAVES to do all the hard-work. Actually, it probably was the civilization that most relied on slavery. So while the Roman Democracy was a good thing for the Roman citizens, it was VERY bad for everybody else.
I agree that the Greek, and then the Roman Democracy are the greatest legacy of the western cultures... But it worked only for a minority, and at the cost of the suffering and hard work of many, many people.
Well,
s m
Actually Christianity is a general term for the group of people that follow Jesus. There are several Christian religions, you just can't put all of them in the same pack! Maybe in the USA there's only the Catholics and the Protestants... but even among these two there is a lot of difference on their beliefs.
And elsewhere in the world there's even more Christian religions! For example, here at Brazil we have Umbanda[1] and Candomblé[2], two Christian religions that mix the Catholic and African traditions, and that have some aspects in common with the more scholar and scientific oriented Kardecist Spiritualism[3][4]. Can you say that people that follow these beliefs are more or less "true Christians" than the others?
So, to answer your question... I think you can't say there's something like a "true Christian", you are one or not, you believe or don't[5].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbanda
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candombl%C3%A9
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardecist_Spirituali
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Kardec
[5] I don't
...or anybody else looked at the title and wondered about a printed version of "Yahoo! News" bundled on local newspapers? Or better, subscript to the sections you like the most, and receive a personalized newspaper at home, every day!
:-\
But no... it's just some stupid ad business.
But, this only concerns the USA, right?
I mean, patents on software are invalid elsewhere, as far as I know.
Also, If there's something in the kernel code that Microsoft can claim as a patent breach, I guess there's lot more on the Solaris Kernel... It would be easy for Sun to claim that as Linux is a closer relative to Solaris, and relate the "patented code" to analogous code on Solaris, code that doesn't belongs to MSFT. IBM could do this with their AIX too...
This MSFT FUD is just ridiculous, and I really doubt that they will risk any real move. Mainly because they can't afford to loose this one at the court... it's their last resort against Linux. If the judge decides that Linux doesn't infringes any patent, it will be one barrier less to its adoption.
I have tho disagree with you,
The iPod clickwheel was a true innovation, that no one has come with before. So my opinion is that it was a valid and fair patent.
On the other side, this Apple's new patent application just defines a particular use for an touchscreen... something that has been around for ages.
I think City of Heroes has a nice solution.
It's focused on team play, a team of players can have much more success than someone playing solo. And there's the SideKicking/Exemplar system, where the player level can be raised or lowered, so he can always join a team and have fun.
Also, economy isn't really a key factor on the game, in the end the combination of powers is what really mater.
Well, just put non-lethal ammo on this thing.
If it fires at you by accident, you'll end with a few bruises and tearing eyes, nothing more. It can be useful to protect borders, and other large areas that demand lots of people to patrol.
It doesn't have to kill people to keep them away.
Hummm,
You can get close to this by installing OpenOffice Calc, MySQL, and hooking the two together. It's not as simple as to create an empty spreadsheet file, but it's doable even by the average user if you teach him.
But, I don't think most users out there needs, or understands, the relational system that governs modern databases. Of course it would be nice to see OpenOffice as a nicely integrated frontent to MySQL (or Postgres, or Firebird, etc...).
And on the closed source front... if people are willing to pay, why give it for free?
I have some experience with it on Linux,
:-)
We used Firebird on a project called "Remédio em Casa" (Medicine at Home), for the Rio de Janeiro city Health Department. People suffering from a heart condition or diabetes would come to a public hospital, get their diagnoses, an then receive medicine for 3 months of treatment at their homes, by mail.
The patient data is sent to a Java Servlet by a Delphi desktop Application, the medical subscript data is sent to the Post Office along with the patient address, and everything was stored on a Firebird database running on Debian Linux.
Last time I was involved with the project, we had a 3GB database, with over 270 thousand people attended... Somebody from the brazilian Firebird user Group told us that this was the largest Firebird database in operation at Brasil
I can only tell good things about Firebird. It has a straight forward command line interface, its easy to manage, backup and restore, and has an excellent performance.
Just my $0.02
http://www.zope.org/
Zope, an Application server written with Python.
At least here at Brazil it has a good acceptance, and there are good oportunities for pyhton developers here.
So I guess Sun won this one.
How many phones DON'T have java capabilities these days?