This is a fantastic step. Kudos to everyone involved. eldavojohn: resource.org is simply amazing. everyone should know about that site and its [many!] works.
Bigoted and ill-spirited posts such as this one are no credit to the other OLPC support volunteers. Please don't assume you speak for anyone but yourself. Those donating to OLPC contribute greatly to its mission, with their enthusiasm and their sharing of the projects ideals as much as with their donations; aside from which they deserve the same respect and consideration you would give to anyone.
I don't know your reasons for posting anonymously, but it seems to me this is rarely appropriate and never obvious. You should be proud to take responsibility for your statements, however controversial. Posting openly, as a long-time OLPC supporter and current staff member, I see the honest and considered feedback from the Slashdot community as important to the refinement and amplification of the project's mission.
The keyboard is designed to be replaceable at home (as is the touchpad, the LCD, just the LCD lightbar, and even the bumpers...). Sophie & Philip demonstrate separating the display an motherboard (similar disassembly of the bottom half allows for replacing the keyboard and touchpad).
At the moment, the bottleneck for people in the US is getting replacement parts -- in the meantime, you can install an ASK-3100 keyboard instead (for +clickiness and -waterproofing).
The point is indeed to make a Python port for hackability; at the same time there is internationalization work to be done. And there are interesting networking and customization features that have been suggested (some of which Don has worked on in previous versions). EA's open sourcing of the Linux port was a crucial first step.
Actually, my money's on Wikipedia making it to eleventy-billion by 2021. ("Yessirree, that's just ten articles for every may, woman, and child on the planet.") At which point the current 0.01% Featured Article ratio would leave us with just over twelve million FAs... by which logic we could have a million as soon as 2018.
But almost 100 articles somewhere along the polishing process:-) Think of it this way: another group of encyclopedists get to learn how to write and review encyclopedic content; another group of readers get to think carefully about the powers of collaboration. In the end, everyone wins. Or all the users do, at least.
There are regions of the world where individual philanthropists and companies are the main sponsors of libraries and other knowledge repositories. However, there are many more regions where dedicated non-profit orgs and governments pick up that burden. A combination of those three with the growing cultural more of information acessibility, should suffice to avoid your hypothetical peanut-flavoured doom.
If the German DVD-production efforts are any indication, this would not include all articles, but a significant fraction of them; and only one version per article, generally the latest one at the time of the snapshot.
As for contributing your ideas to a discussion of "Wikipedia 1.0", here is a discussion about that project on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki. Deciding which photographs and artwork to include, and how much text to include for each article, will be some of the interesting subprojects.
That would be awfully annoying. Google ads are already a reason I dislike searching with Google... It would grate to see them on WP every day as well. But WP lets you fiddle with your own javascript prefs; I bet you could work it out so that *you* get to see Google ads, if you really want them...
Wikipedia is always looking for good hosting offers. Hosting from Africa, Asia, or South America would be particularly nice. Wikidev has a page where you can offer hosting; if you know people who run a hosting facility and would be interested in helping out, please point them there! That page also describes the qualities of an ideal offer.
Current hosts (and existing offers):
There is a cluster of squids hosted for free by Lost Oasis in Paris, serving around 2TB/month. There is a serious hosting offer from a group in the Netherlands that is being pursued (this must wait on various legal details; they want to have a formal agreement with a Dutch chapter, which must first be formed, etc).
AFAIK, the only serious offers from universities have been for backup hosting in the case of / in preparation for an emergency.
A passive tether system to get through the bulk of the atmosphere seems much more likely to succeed than any of the ideas for ground-to-GEO elevators, even once the elevator is built. An asynchronous, scattered approach to the first miles off the ground would also remove most of the potential danger from unfriendly people, animals, or weather.
Like the thousands of 'reviewers' who posted to online fora about how great "Alien vs. Predator" was.
Yes, fake contributors are a real problem. But they're not very bright; it's not the kind of job every little girl and boy aspires to have when they grow up. So when they can't just submit a comment and have it stick there, permanently -- but have to defend themselves against their opposition -- they tend to go away.
More troublesome than marketing shills are the zealots (in quasi-science, religion, politics, you name it) who refuse to believe anything but their adopted line, and feel that the world is conspiring against their point of view. They're not limited by the ROI on time invested in a flame war; to the contrary, they are invigorated by the prospect of decade-long struggles against the ignorance of the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that by "x86 OLPC" they mean the current XO 1.5 which is powered by a 1GHz VIA chip.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification_1.5
That's correct.
This is a fantastic step. Kudos to everyone involved. eldavojohn: resource.org is simply amazing. everyone should know about that site and its [many!] works.
Bigoted and ill-spirited posts such as this one are no credit to the other OLPC support volunteers. Please don't assume you speak for anyone but yourself. Those donating to OLPC contribute greatly to its mission, with their enthusiasm and their sharing of the projects ideals as much as with their donations; aside from which they deserve the same respect and consideration you would give to anyone.
I don't know your reasons for posting anonymously, but it seems to me this is rarely appropriate and never obvious. You should be proud to take responsibility for your statements, however controversial. Posting openly, as a long-time OLPC supporter and current staff member, I see the honest and considered feedback from the Slashdot community as important to the refinement and amplification of the project's mission.
The keyboard is designed to be replaceable at home (as is the touchpad, the LCD, just the LCD lightbar, and even the bumpers...). Sophie & Philip demonstrate separating the display an motherboard (similar disassembly of the bottom half allows for replacing the keyboard and touchpad).
At the moment, the bottleneck for people in the US is getting replacement parts -- in the meantime, you can install an ASK-3100 keyboard instead (for +clickiness and -waterproofing).
The point is indeed to make a Python port for hackability; at the same time there is internationalization work to be done. And there are interesting networking and customization features that have been suggested (some of which Don has worked on in previous versions). EA's open sourcing of the Linux port was a crucial first step.
SJ
Actually, my money's on Wikipedia making it to eleventy-billion by 2021. ("Yessirree, that's just ten articles for every may, woman, and child on the planet.") At which point the current 0.01% Featured Article ratio would leave us with just over twelve million FAs... by which logic we could have a million as soon as 2018.
But almost 100 articles somewhere along the polishing process :-) Think of it this way: another group of encyclopedists get to learn how to write and review encyclopedic content; another group of readers get to think carefully about the powers of collaboration. In the end, everyone wins. Or all the users do, at least.
(But what do you have against Terry Semel?)
As for contributing your ideas to a discussion of "Wikipedia 1.0", here is a discussion about that project on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki. Deciding which photographs and artwork to include, and how much text to include for each article, will be some of the interesting subprojects.
But yes, a variety of hosts around the world would be a Good Thing.
That would be awfully annoying. Google ads are already a reason I dislike searching with Google... It would grate to see them on WP every day as well. But WP lets you fiddle with your own javascript prefs; I bet you could work it out so that *you* get to see Google ads, if you really want them...
Donations of both hits and trolls have been awfully helpful in making the site and community robust. Thanks, Slashdot!
Current hosts (and existing offers):
There is a cluster of squids hosted for free by Lost Oasis in Paris, serving around 2TB/month. There is a serious hosting offer from a group in the Netherlands that is being pursued (this must wait on various legal details; they want to have a formal agreement with a Dutch chapter, which must first be formed, etc).
AFAIK, the only serious offers from universities have been for backup hosting in the case of / in preparation for an emergency.
+sj+
+sj+
Yes, fake contributors are a real problem. But they're not very bright; it's not the kind of job every little girl and boy aspires to have when they grow up. So when they can't just submit a comment and have it stick there, permanently -- but have to defend themselves against their opposition -- they tend to go away.
More troublesome than marketing shills are the zealots (in quasi-science, religion, politics, you name it) who refuse to believe anything but their adopted line, and feel that the world is conspiring against their point of view. They're not limited by the ROI on time invested in a flame war; to the contrary, they are invigorated by the prospect of decade-long struggles against the ignorance of the masses.
+sj+