XOs are built differently from the eeepc. If I had a choice, I would get the OLPC over any of the "netbooks" or other cheap ultralightweights, even at the same price point.
USD 200 to USD 300 is not a small increase, either. But the price of OLPC will come down as the volume ramps up.
The price of eeepc and similar is at the bottom of the commercially viable pricing point for this kind of hardware. There's a reason that you don't see anything dropping under that price point, or anything really beating it at that price point. Market pressure for this class of machine is still to drive the price of the hardware up. (Look at the recent eeepc models.)
I wish the OLPC people could find a way to like the hardware into the regular market at the USD 300 price point. Or even reinstitute the G1G1 program at USD 500 so they can build the commercial delivery and support infrastructure.
At this point, all I can get in Japan is the MSWxp model at JPY 50,000 (roughly USD 500 at current exchange). I'm saving up to get one so I can type on the train. I'd far prefer the OLPC.
Ubuntu live CD boots fine on an old clamshell iBook, but does funny things to video on similar vintage iMacs, making it impossible to install from a live CD.
Again, YMMV, but I think having both is a very good thing for the desktop, as well.
While I'm wondering how to find out whether the current openmoko is compatible with my docomo foma contract here in Japan, I'm also wondering how to hook a keyboard up to it.
It's really hard to blog on a phone pad, and I can't see a touchscreen of that size being much easier than a phone pad.
An OLPC with a phone modem in it, or a rollout of wifi hotspots equivalent to the cellphone networks would either one make the iPhone obsolete.
Control over knowledge is the most effective way to maintain monopolies and totalitarian regimes.
Many of the poor countries are in the awkward position of one totalitarian regime having said, "Okay, let's see if the people can handle freedom." and no one in their society able to fill the power vacuum. Teaching the children how to access knowledge is a great way to help them (and their parents) figure out good ways to fill the power vacuum.
Now, why do the established educational institutions find the concept uncomfortable?
I'd say that a charitable foundation with a mandate to provide for its on continued existence is not as much a charitable foundation as one with a simple mandate to help people.
Interest has to come from somewhere, you know.
I'd mumble something about a rich guy giving some of his friends permanent high-paying feel-good jobs, contrasting it to my efforts to help lower-middle-class kids get an education on less-than-lower-middle-class wages and a contract that is completely up in the air every year, with no way for my performance to buy me either tenure or higher wages. But I suspect my mumblings would be misconstrued to be the mumblings of a crazy man.
If the charity foundation is investing in the refineries, perhaps the charity foundation could use some of its presence on the board to induce the company to build environmental controls into its hardware?
Capital economies don't have to operate as slaves to the bottom line. Bill G's charity is by nature going to have a hard time demonstrating that fact, and that is really what the whole criticism is about.
If I were in charge of Microsoft and interested at all in saving the company, here's what I'd do.
Split the company into three parts. Hmm. No, make that four. Five.
One company handles the legacy junk. Maintains it under current licenses (sans enforcement machinery) in more or less the way it is being maintained now. Maybe some necessary incremental improvements when there's no way to fix a vulnerability in the legacy framework. This company will ultimately be absorbed by the fourth company, but it is necessary for a few years.
Another company focuses on the various problems of open sourcing all the "IP" and "technology" in Microsoft's legacy products. This is important in establishing a way out for all of the customers Microsoft has locked in. This company also consults with the other companies to keep the whole operation clean on licensing. It will probably remain independent, to help it keep the other companies playing fair.
The third company focuses on hosting repositories of foss projects and on building Microsoft-specific distributions of Linux, BSD, maybe Plan 9, Apache, the Gimp, Open Office, PostGreSQL, and many other open source offerings. Oh, Wine, et. al., of course. But no funny business with the licenses. All strictly according to the open source rules, and all regularly feeding funding upstream from that huge capitalization. This company will also remain independent.
The fourth company puts the legacy stuff as unmodified as possible on top of solid foundations culled from open source. Again, no license shenanigans. Nothing from legacy is allowed here until the IP/tech group clears it. And it is kept as cross-platform as possible. This company will be absorbed into the the fifth company in twenty to fifty years.
The fifth company hunts for anything that was actually good from the legacy stuff and implements blue-sky projects to see what shakes out. The products will be primarily released under GPL3 or higher or Apache 2 or higher when implementing stuff that's really new, merged upstream or forked appropriately and without license conflicts when they borrow.
The bulk of the new income stream will be service agreements on the stuff the fifth company produces.
Why should they do this? Because it's their mess and they ought to clean it up, especially since they have all that money from making the mess.
The apocalypse happening in 70 AD requires just as much inappropriate interpolation as preterism concludes that futurism requires.
Many of the prophecies were fulfilled in 70 AD. Many were not. Many have been and will yet be fulfilled several times. (Evil has certain recurring themes.)
What kind of apocalypse is a question to consider. Many atheists are concerned about global warming or accept the possibility of a technological/social singularity. Many tend to (rationally? irrationally?) believe in community/race consciousness and such things, such that the prophecies are actually independent of religion. So, an atheist is likely to not even consider the possibility of an actual apocalypse being the second coming of the Messiah.
But, for another issue to consider, no matter how reasonable one's own understanding of God may be to oneself, there are always elements that appear from the objective point of view to defy orderly rules of logic.
Non-sequiter seems to be the biggest complaint, and with good reason. Ultimately, as Joshua said, "Chose you this day whom ye will serve."
So, yeah, after Jesus comes again in glory, the concept of His existence will become eminently reasonable, and there is a danger that many Christians might start attempting to depend entirely on reason for their faith.
Atheists, on the other hand, will be faced with a choice. Learn how to let reason have its place and let faith have its place, or abandon reason entirely.
Different product, but I've seen and heard indications that my Docomo P903iTV by panasonic is running on top of Linux. I can't find any mention of Linux in the manuals, let alone an offer of source for the kernel, etc., or any indication of a way to access a shell, etc.
There is a java API, called, I think, iAppli. I haven't found much on getting dev stuff for it in the manuals, but it can be found on the web. I think. I haven't actually tried it yet, and it doesn't look like they make it easy to figure out where to start.
While I'm complaining, the USB adaptor is "not guaranteed to work with Macs or Linux". The sales guy I talked to seemed almost proud to say that and seemed quite anxious to discourage me from buying the adaptor to see if I can even mount the internal flash or the microSD card. I let him discourage me because money is really tight.
If anyone knows anything about this phone, I'd appreciate some pointers.
Lousy Japanese market. The government promotes Linux. Industry likes Linux in industry as long as it's nowhere near the consumer market. Marketing is strictly under the thumb of Microsoft/iNTEL. Can't get a Linux eeePC (not that I'm that anxious to buy an iNTEL processor) in Japan because "this is Japan, of course!" (Implicitly, otaku are expected to be happy to pay the Microsoft tax.)
Okay, if we want to get picky, if the monopoly is run by people who behave morally, it can work as well as a free market full of competitors, because a morally functioning monopoly will allow competing internal functions.
But, if we get so picky, a morally functioning free market full of people is not inferior to the monopoly, because the competitors know when to refrain from cutthroat competition and how.
It's the non-ideal cases. Both models can wander into pathologically malfunctioning modes. The problem is the recovery process.
In the case of a monopoly, there are just a few people ultimately in charge, and when they become corrupted (historically a very common thing) the pathological behavior can't be corrected without either getting rid of them or convincing them to behave themselves.
In the free market case, it only takes a few brave people to behave morally to keep the system from destroying itself.
I think I like the odds on the latter more than on the former.
Software makes a stupid business model specifically because the road to mediocrity is paved by the temptation of lock-in. (Low expectations? There you are.)
Think twice about the philosophy you spout, sometimes.
But, also, don't buy "netbook" class PCs with iNTEL chips.
Huh? Why? Isn't AMD just as bad?
Actually, I was thinking of VIA, of course. Or wishing that someone would build a netbook with a low-power PPC or an ARM or (why not?) ColdFire. The more, different CPUs, the merrier.
Supporting the underdog is actually an act of self-preservation. Keep the dogs busy fighting each other and they have to treat us with some sort of respect.
Don't buy what they're selling, but especially when they're selling the "Everybody's doing it!" excuse.
Even though someone else said it already, I'm going to try to make it glaringly obvious for all the mods that modded you up insightful or whatever --
In the unix world, we learned a long time ago not to put the home directory or the current working directory in the default executable path variable. The reasons were known before MS-Dos was a product, although there were still some *nix products from the less savvy vendors that had.profile put "." in "$PATH" when MSWindows95 became a product.
Reputable *nix vendors have had that fixed for at least a decade.
There is only one MSWindwsXXX vendor, and they still leave the path effectively set up to include a place where downloading, drive-by or otherwise, tends to drop things.
That's a no-no for all the user-clicks-through reasons being cited.
Safari's bug was just a Denial-Of-Service type of bug without this design flaw in MSWindows.
More and more managers are behaving as if following the example of the Bill & Steve act is actually good business.
Nothing new about it, read about it in the history of Rome and earlier, as far back as we can read history about nations warring against each other, in fact.
Money is like pus. It collects at wounds, and collects faster at dirty wounds.
Well, while kancho is offensive behavior and I usually tell the kids to quit it when I see them giving or exchanging kancho, without going into detail, that's not what I stopped yesterday.
Don't remember, other than that the Asian systems are no cure for any of the ills being mentioned here. And that I wouldn't call the Japanese system "better" in any sense at all.
Not even the test scores, and especially not when balanced against the suicide rate or the rate of lynchings at school.
However, I won't argue with you if you are asserting that there are no pat answers. Large classes can work if the parents are supporting their kids efforts to get an education in certain ways, and if the teachers know how to help the students learn by teaching each other.
If you are not trolling, or even if you are, don't try to avoid the inevitable.
Once your box is rooted, it's not worth the trouble of trying to clean it out. You can't know where they've hidden every last one of their fallback trojans, so it's only a matter of time before you're rooted again.
Until the teachers can recognize that, until the schools can properly support teachers who try to respond to the gifts in each student, I'm not sure it's a good idea to give too much attention to those who do well on standardized tests on a few specific subjects.
Any government that does not have recognition of the inherent freedoms of the (individual) citizens as one of its fundamental principles is already corrupt, and is primarily interested in perpetuating itself.
The only governments that can truly last are governments that do not attempt to perpetuate themselves.
And this is on topic because public school systems beyond third grade are always a tool of governments that have abandoned the principles of freedom. (Or beyond sixth in Japan and China, perhaps, because of the large number of characters that have to be learned before a child can properly bootstrap his or her education.)
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XOs are built differently from the eeepc. If I had a choice, I would get the OLPC over any of the "netbooks" or other cheap ultralightweights, even at the same price point.
USD 200 to USD 300 is not a small increase, either. But the price of OLPC will come down as the volume ramps up.
The price of eeepc and similar is at the bottom of the commercially viable pricing point for this kind of hardware. There's a reason that you don't see anything dropping under that price point, or anything really beating it at that price point. Market pressure for this class of machine is still to drive the price of the hardware up. (Look at the recent eeepc models.)
I wish the OLPC people could find a way to like the hardware into the regular market at the USD 300 price point. Or even reinstitute the G1G1 program at USD 500 so they can build the commercial delivery and support infrastructure.
At this point, all I can get in Japan is the MSWxp model at JPY 50,000 (roughly USD 500 at current exchange). I'm saving up to get one so I can type on the train. I'd far prefer the OLPC.
I have quite successfully used Fedora on laptops.
YMMV
Ubuntu live CD boots fine on an old clamshell iBook, but does funny things to video on similar vintage iMacs, making it impossible to install from a live CD.
Again, YMMV, but I think having both is a very good thing for the desktop, as well.
While I'm wondering how to find out whether the current openmoko is compatible with my docomo foma contract here in Japan, I'm also wondering how to hook a keyboard up to it.
It's really hard to blog on a phone pad, and I can't see a touchscreen of that size being much easier than a phone pad.
An OLPC with a phone modem in it, or a rollout of wifi hotspots equivalent to the cellphone networks would either one make the iPhone obsolete.
Control over knowledge is the most effective way to maintain monopolies and totalitarian regimes.
Many of the poor countries are in the awkward position of one totalitarian regime having said, "Okay, let's see if the people can handle freedom." and no one in their society able to fill the power vacuum. Teaching the children how to access knowledge is a great way to help them (and their parents) figure out good ways to fill the power vacuum.
Now, why do the established educational institutions find the concept uncomfortable?
I'd say that a charitable foundation with a mandate to provide for its on continued existence is not as much a charitable foundation as one with a simple mandate to help people.
Interest has to come from somewhere, you know.
I'd mumble something about a rich guy giving some of his friends permanent high-paying feel-good jobs, contrasting it to my efforts to help lower-middle-class kids get an education on less-than-lower-middle-class wages and a contract that is completely up in the air every year, with no way for my performance to buy me either tenure or higher wages. But I suspect my mumblings would be misconstrued to be the mumblings of a crazy man.
If the charity foundation is investing in the refineries, perhaps the charity foundation could use some of its presence on the board to induce the company to build environmental controls into its hardware?
Capital economies don't have to operate as slaves to the bottom line. Bill G's charity is by nature going to have a hard time demonstrating that fact, and that is really what the whole criticism is about.
I'm not sure what you're saying.
Is it okay to tie science up in IP as long as it's not math?
Shoot no. These guys are (wannabee) artists.
Correction. Take the parenthesis off. They are _wannabee_ artists.
Make no mistake about this. They want control, not money.
If I were in charge of Microsoft and interested at all in saving the company, here's what I'd do.
Split the company into three parts. Hmm. No, make that four. Five.
One company handles the legacy junk. Maintains it under current licenses (sans enforcement machinery) in more or less the way it is being maintained now. Maybe some necessary incremental improvements when there's no way to fix a vulnerability in the legacy framework. This company will ultimately be absorbed by the fourth company, but it is necessary for a few years.
Another company focuses on the various problems of open sourcing all the "IP" and "technology" in Microsoft's legacy products. This is important in establishing a way out for all of the customers Microsoft has locked in. This company also consults with the other companies to keep the whole operation clean on licensing. It will probably remain independent, to help it keep the other companies playing fair.
The third company focuses on hosting repositories of foss projects and on building Microsoft-specific distributions of Linux, BSD, maybe Plan 9, Apache, the Gimp, Open Office, PostGreSQL, and many other open source offerings. Oh, Wine, et. al., of course. But no funny business with the licenses. All strictly according to the open source rules, and all regularly feeding funding upstream from that huge capitalization. This company will also remain independent.
The fourth company puts the legacy stuff as unmodified as possible on top of solid foundations culled from open source. Again, no license shenanigans. Nothing from legacy is allowed here until the IP/tech group clears it. And it is kept as cross-platform as possible. This company will be absorbed into the the fifth company in twenty to fifty years.
The fifth company hunts for anything that was actually good from the legacy stuff and implements blue-sky projects to see what shakes out. The products will be primarily released under GPL3 or higher or Apache 2 or higher when implementing stuff that's really new, merged upstream or forked appropriately and without license conflicts when they borrow.
The bulk of the new income stream will be service agreements on the stuff the fifth company produces.
Why should they do this? Because it's their mess and they ought to clean it up, especially since they have all that money from making the mess.
The apocalypse happening in 70 AD requires just as much inappropriate interpolation as preterism concludes that futurism requires.
Many of the prophecies were fulfilled in 70 AD. Many were not. Many have been and will yet be fulfilled several times. (Evil has certain recurring themes.)
I don't think it's that simple.
What kind of apocalypse is a question to consider. Many atheists are concerned about global warming or accept the possibility of a technological/social singularity. Many tend to (rationally? irrationally?) believe in community/race consciousness and such things, such that the prophecies are actually independent of religion. So, an atheist is likely to not even consider the possibility of an actual apocalypse being the second coming of the Messiah.
But, for another issue to consider, no matter how reasonable one's own understanding of God may be to oneself, there are always elements that appear from the objective point of view to defy orderly rules of logic.
Non-sequiter seems to be the biggest complaint, and with good reason. Ultimately, as Joshua said, "Chose you this day whom ye will serve."
So, yeah, after Jesus comes again in glory, the concept of His existence will become eminently reasonable, and there is a danger that many Christians might start attempting to depend entirely on reason for their faith.
Atheists, on the other hand, will be faced with a choice. Learn how to let reason have its place and let faith have its place, or abandon reason entirely.
Like I say, not a simple answer.
hmmm.
God, maybe?
roll ... roll ... roll ............ rimshot
Different product, but I've seen and heard indications that my Docomo P903iTV by panasonic is running on top of Linux. I can't find any mention of Linux in the manuals, let alone an offer of source for the kernel, etc., or any indication of a way to access a shell, etc.
There is a java API, called, I think, iAppli. I haven't found much on getting dev stuff for it in the manuals, but it can be found on the web. I think. I haven't actually tried it yet, and it doesn't look like they make it easy to figure out where to start.
While I'm complaining, the USB adaptor is "not guaranteed to work with Macs or Linux". The sales guy I talked to seemed almost proud to say that and seemed quite anxious to discourage me from buying the adaptor to see if I can even mount the internal flash or the microSD card. I let him discourage me because money is really tight.
If anyone knows anything about this phone, I'd appreciate some pointers.
Lousy Japanese market. The government promotes Linux. Industry likes Linux in industry as long as it's nowhere near the consumer market. Marketing is strictly under the thumb of Microsoft/iNTEL. Can't get a Linux eeePC (not that I'm that anxious to buy an iNTEL processor) in Japan because "this is Japan, of course!" (Implicitly, otaku are expected to be happy to pay the Microsoft tax.)
Okay, if we want to get picky, if the monopoly is run by people who behave morally, it can work as well as a free market full of competitors, because a morally functioning monopoly will allow competing internal functions.
But, if we get so picky, a morally functioning free market full of people is not inferior to the monopoly, because the competitors know when to refrain from cutthroat competition and how.
It's the non-ideal cases. Both models can wander into pathologically malfunctioning modes. The problem is the recovery process.
In the case of a monopoly, there are just a few people ultimately in charge, and when they become corrupted (historically a very common thing) the pathological behavior can't be corrected without either getting rid of them or convincing them to behave themselves.
In the free market case, it only takes a few brave people to behave morally to keep the system from destroying itself.
I think I like the odds on the latter more than on the former.
Why is it that war in the marketplace is more acceptable than war on the streets?
I suppose people die more immediately from bombs and bullets, but putting people out of jobs is not a nice thing to do, either.
And monopolies cannot employ as many people as a collection of competing companies, and they cannot provide as many solutions.
Why is it that people can't see that the end goal of competition is not just one single winner?
Software makes a stupid business model specifically because the road to mediocrity is paved by the temptation of lock-in. (Low expectations? There you are.)
Think twice about the philosophy you spout, sometimes.
Don't buy what they're selling.
Don't buy MSWindows, of course.
But, also, don't buy "netbook" class PCs with iNTEL chips.
Huh? Why? Isn't AMD just as bad?
Actually, I was thinking of VIA, of course. Or wishing that someone would build a netbook with a low-power PPC or an ARM or (why not?) ColdFire. The more, different CPUs, the merrier.
Supporting the underdog is actually an act of self-preservation. Keep the dogs busy fighting each other and they have to treat us with some sort of respect.
Don't buy what they're selling, but especially when they're selling the "Everybody's doing it!" excuse.
Even though someone else said it already, I'm going to try to make it glaringly obvious for all the mods that modded you up insightful or whatever --
In the unix world, we learned a long time ago not to put the home directory or the current working directory in the default executable path variable. The reasons were known before MS-Dos was a product, although there were still some *nix products from the less savvy vendors that had .profile put "." in "$PATH" when MSWindows95 became a product.
Reputable *nix vendors have had that fixed for at least a decade.
There is only one MSWindwsXXX vendor, and they still leave the path effectively set up to include a place where downloading, drive-by or otherwise, tends to drop things.
That's a no-no for all the user-clicks-through reasons being cited.
Safari's bug was just a Denial-Of-Service type of bug without this design flaw in MSWindows.
More and more managers are behaving as if following the example of the Bill & Steve act is actually good business.
Nothing new about it, read about it in the history of Rome and earlier, as far back as we can read history about nations warring against each other, in fact.
Money is like pus. It collects at wounds, and collects faster at dirty wounds.
Well, while kancho is offensive behavior and I usually tell the kids to quit it when I see them giving or exchanging kancho, without going into detail, that's not what I stopped yesterday.
Don't remember, other than that the Asian systems are no cure for any of the ills being mentioned here. And that I wouldn't call the Japanese system "better" in any sense at all.
Not even the test scores, and especially not when balanced against the suicide rate or the rate of lynchings at school.
However, I won't argue with you if you are asserting that there are no pat answers. Large classes can work if the parents are supporting their kids efforts to get an education in certain ways, and if the teachers know how to help the students learn by teaching each other.
If you are not trolling, or even if you are, don't try to avoid the inevitable.
Once your box is rooted, it's not worth the trouble of trying to clean it out. You can't know where they've hidden every last one of their fallback trojans, so it's only a matter of time before you're rooted again.
superior in what?
inferior in what?
Do you want a ruler to fix that headache you must have?
Until the teachers can recognize that, until the schools can properly support teachers who try to respond to the gifts in each student, I'm not sure it's a good idea to give too much attention to those who do well on standardized tests on a few specific subjects.
Any government that does not have recognition of the inherent freedoms of the (individual) citizens as one of its fundamental principles is already corrupt, and is primarily interested in perpetuating itself.
The only governments that can truly last are governments that do not attempt to perpetuate themselves.
And this is on topic because public school systems beyond third grade are always a tool of governments that have abandoned the principles of freedom. (Or beyond sixth in Japan and China, perhaps, because of the large number of characters that have to be learned before a child can properly bootstrap his or her education.)