And this is why most US medical school students are going into Radiology, Anesthesiology, etc. and not Family Practice or Pediatrics. There's a shortage of primary care physicians, especially in rural areas. Seems as if it will keep getting worse.
With the Classmate, they were successful in curbing the enthusiasm of the OLPC project (which faltered for many other reasons as well). Intel may have similar goals here, namely take away momentum from their competition, without actually having to sell many units. The Raspberry Pi has many uses, but one big one is a lightweight web-browser PC. That has the potential to cannibalize the traditional desktop market, which surely has higher margins for Intel. So their goal is to kill the low-margin market, not compete in it. If they announce a product that costs less than $100 and can run Windows, that may slow down Raspberry Pi from gaining traction as a lightweight desktop replacement.
Manufacturers would do that if they could, but it's not technically feasible given space, cost, and electrical constraints. That's the whole point of the article. Your antenna needs to be tuned for every frequency band that you support, so there is a finite number that you can support well. Also, the power amplifier must support each frequency band. Also, the RF receiver must support each band and each protocol in hardware. It's not trivial at all to add a new frequency and/or protocol.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the phone shouldn't cost anywhere near $560. It probably costs Motorola less than $200 to produce the phone, and they probably sell it to VZW for less than $300. If anyone buys the phone for $560, VZW is making a killing on them.
Most of those Older Pc's cant boot from a USB stick. It's only been the past 3 years that booting from a usb drive has become the norm, before that it was an oddity.
There is a boot helper CD for older computers like this. The beauty is that the OS on the computer is untouched, since Sugar runs from memory not the hard drive. Additionally, all progress is saved to the USB drive, so the stick is portable from computer to computer.
This research seems very similar to what came out of Purdue six months ago. I guess having two methods is better than one, but this article isn't quite so dramatic given the Purdue research.
The OMAP 3530 can only do 720p if you have a format that's not CPU intensive to decode, such as MPEG2. It takes quite a bit more horsepower to decode H264/AVC and I'm fairly certain that the OMAP 3530 can't handle that.
Oh, you want to play sound with that too? That adds more load to the CPU or DSP. The OMAP3's are beautiful little processors, but using them for a media center is pushing their limits.
Or we could teach kids about Linux which doesn't normally require defragmenting or virus scanners.
But more to the point, kids should be learning a lot more than Word or computer maintenance. The computer should be a tool to help students learn whatever is in the curriculum, whether it be English, Math, or Computer Science.
Shiny new boxes won't fix the problem, but putting useful software on the machines would help. For example, Sugar has lot of useful software that will challenge kids intellectually. The Sugar community is working on bootable Live USB images with persistent data storage, so that you can keep your OS and data on a flash drive, and run it on whatever computer is available to you (at school or home).
Changing teacher's attitudes would also help. Many teachers are intimidated by technology, but I think they are more intimidated that their students know more than they do about it. Learning technology requires some humility on the part of teachers.
I get the impression that the iPhone app uses server side voice recognition. The digital audio is sent to the servers, it is processed and the results are sent to the search engine, and then the results are transferred to the user. Doing the VR on the server is great for this use case because you're already querying the server for the search request. Google can process the audio in an efficient server farm rather than on the resource constrained phone. They can also easily upgrade their algorithms after they mine data. It's kind of hard to compare this to phone-side VR, which would probably be faster in response time, but otherwise inferior in my estimation. The response time would be important for highly interactive applications though. I can't stand the lag on ATT's customer service telephone system.
The G1 lacks enough storage for me, but the data plan is more attractive. The iPhone has the storage but the data plan is a potential nightmare.
Actually I prefer that the G1 has less storage and a microSD slot. MicroSD cards are very inexpensive so it's easy to increase the storage capacity of the device. When flash capacities have doubled (as they have been every year), it's easy to buy a new microSD card for $30, but it's impossible to increase the storage on your iPhone. This only works if your hardware and firmware support the larger microSD sizes, but the G1 supports SDHC cards and firmware updates so it's fairly future proof.
Why are you referring to OLPC in the past tense? The organization hasn't lived up to it's goals, but they have shipped around half a million laptops to kids around the world. The Linux-based Sugar software continues to improve and there are many volunteers contributing to the project. The organization got a lot flak when Negroponte announced the Windows XP port, but many volunteers and employees put their bad feelings aside and continue to work on the project. Now Sugar Labs (the software spinoff) is branching out in order to incorporate their software in other Linux distributions. There are also several ports underway to put Sugar on other laptops and embedded devices.
And it wasn't designed in some out of touch lab. It was designed for harsh environments, limited internet connectivity, intermittent electrical power, bright sunlight readability, and children with no previous knowledge of computers. I think the XO-1 is a remarkable piece of hardware.
I used to work for Motorola, and I can attest that the standard 3 bar battery gauge showed:
50% of the battery life at 3 bars
30% at 2 bars
15% at 1 bar
5% at 0 bars
And yes, this was customizable by the carrier to make it better or worse. Of course, this is hard to prove to the sceptics unless the software is open source.
There are numerous other technical reasons why the gauges might not be accurate, but this is a big factor.
Actually, the Fedora based LiveCD is out of date and there are better options available. More details can be found on the OLPC wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd
This article makes a lot of claims and doesn't back them up.
3G phones have better spectral efficiency than 2G phones, so they transmit less power for a given amount of data. For a given web page, this means a 3G phone will consume less power if all other parts of the system are equivalent. However most 3G phones have faster processors which offset this to some extent. The peak currents in a 3G phone will be higher because it can transmit data faster, and this means you can drain your battery faster if you are using it extensively.
Another important fact is that actual bandwidths can be far less than advertised ones due to the error correction used in both EDGE and 3G networks. If you are far from the base station it will reduce your effective bandwidth until your bit error rate is acceptably low. Thus real world EDGE speeds are less than 200 kbps.
EDGE also supports multislot which uses several time slots to increase speeds. Some networks might support class 8 EDGE while other support class 12. For a better explanation look at http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/gprs/class.shtml. The article talks about GPRS but applies to EDGE as well.
IAAEE as well and I work on cell phones. Please don't just accept rubish claims without any factual evidence.
If something isn't broke, why break it by upgrading? MySQL is constantly changing little details about how their DB works... take a look at a random page in their documentation and you will see notes like "in 4.x.x we changed this" all over the place.
5.0 sounds like it will be a very feature rich database (Yay, triggers!) but it will be a probably be a pain to upgrade. Little quirks that I've relied upon will no longer work that way. Maybe after this release, things will start to stabilize. Doubtful though.
Education is well and good, but putting numbers like $10 billion up on slashdot may do more harm than good. It might trigger more people to participate in these illegal, fraudulent activities.
And as far as education goes, many people are too computer illiterate to understand this. This is how viruses continue to spread via email years after they first appeared. Some people do not learn how or why they spread. Many people don't even know when their computer has a virus on it! If only msconfig was a household term:-P
720 kbps is more than capable for high quality voice. The issues that keep Bluetooth headset quality low are poor acoustics and frequency interference. Bluetooth 1.2 supports Adaptive Frequency Hopping and Enhanced Voice Processing which adds some error correction. But most phones are still Bluetooth 1.1
Part of the problem is that phones are marketed simply as Bluetooth devices, when in reality there are quite a few different profiles that devices can support and several versions of the Bluetooth standard.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is why most US medical school students are going into Radiology, Anesthesiology, etc. and not Family Practice or Pediatrics. There's a shortage of primary care physicians, especially in rural areas. Seems as if it will keep getting worse.
Agreed. His app has 1-5 installs on the Google Play Store. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.symbolapp.top15
Unfortunately Webkit based browsers have 90% mobile market share, so there's little incentive for web developers to code for Firefox, Opera, etc.
With the Classmate, they were successful in curbing the enthusiasm of the OLPC project (which faltered for many other reasons as well). Intel may have similar goals here, namely take away momentum from their competition, without actually having to sell many units. The Raspberry Pi has many uses, but one big one is a lightweight web-browser PC. That has the potential to cannibalize the traditional desktop market, which surely has higher margins for Intel. So their goal is to kill the low-margin market, not compete in it. If they announce a product that costs less than $100 and can run Windows, that may slow down Raspberry Pi from gaining traction as a lightweight desktop replacement.
No, the Motorola Atrix is a phone with a 4.0" screen, not a tablet. http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_atrix-3709.php
Intel made an attempt to enter this market before, and failed, circa 2005. They produced such legendary phones as the Motorola A910.
Manufacturers would do that if they could, but it's not technically feasible given space, cost, and electrical constraints. That's the whole point of the article. Your antenna needs to be tuned for every frequency band that you support, so there is a finite number that you can support well. Also, the power amplifier must support each frequency band. Also, the RF receiver must support each band and each protocol in hardware. It's not trivial at all to add a new frequency and/or protocol.
I hate to break it to you, but the OMAP chips are built on an ARM processor core. OMAP 3400 and 3500 lines are built on an ARM Cortex A8.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the phone shouldn't cost anywhere near $560. It probably costs Motorola less than $200 to produce the phone, and they probably sell it to VZW for less than $300. If anyone buys the phone for $560, VZW is making a killing on them.
Most of those Older Pc's cant boot from a USB stick. It's only been the past 3 years that booting from a usb drive has become the norm, before that it was an oddity.
There is a boot helper CD for older computers like this. The beauty is that the OS on the computer is untouched, since Sugar runs from memory not the hard drive. Additionally, all progress is saved to the USB drive, so the stick is portable from computer to computer.
Note that a UK gallon is 20% larger than a US liquid gallon. Just another reason to use the metric system.
This research seems very similar to what came out of Purdue six months ago. I guess having two methods is better than one, but this article isn't quite so dramatic given the Purdue research.
The OMAP 3530 can only do 720p if you have a format that's not CPU intensive to decode, such as MPEG2. It takes quite a bit more horsepower to decode H264/AVC and I'm fairly certain that the OMAP 3530 can't handle that.
Oh, you want to play sound with that too? That adds more load to the CPU or DSP. The OMAP3's are beautiful little processors, but using them for a media center is pushing their limits.
Or we could teach kids about Linux which doesn't normally require defragmenting or virus scanners.
But more to the point, kids should be learning a lot more than Word or computer maintenance. The computer should be a tool to help students learn whatever is in the curriculum, whether it be English, Math, or Computer Science.
Shiny new boxes won't fix the problem, but putting useful software on the machines would help. For example, Sugar has lot of useful software that will challenge kids intellectually. The Sugar community is working on bootable Live USB images with persistent data storage, so that you can keep your OS and data on a flash drive, and run it on whatever computer is available to you (at school or home).
Changing teacher's attitudes would also help. Many teachers are intimidated by technology, but I think they are more intimidated that their students know more than they do about it. Learning technology requires some humility on the part of teachers.
I get the impression that the iPhone app uses server side voice recognition. The digital audio is sent to the servers, it is processed and the results are sent to the search engine, and then the results are transferred to the user. Doing the VR on the server is great for this use case because you're already querying the server for the search request. Google can process the audio in an efficient server farm rather than on the resource constrained phone. They can also easily upgrade their algorithms after they mine data. It's kind of hard to compare this to phone-side VR, which would probably be faster in response time, but otherwise inferior in my estimation. The response time would be important for highly interactive applications though. I can't stand the lag on ATT's customer service telephone system.
The G1 lacks enough storage for me, but the data plan is more attractive. The iPhone has the storage but the data plan is a potential nightmare.
Actually I prefer that the G1 has less storage and a microSD slot. MicroSD cards are very inexpensive so it's easy to increase the storage capacity of the device. When flash capacities have doubled (as they have been every year), it's easy to buy a new microSD card for $30, but it's impossible to increase the storage on your iPhone. This only works if your hardware and firmware support the larger microSD sizes, but the G1 supports SDHC cards and firmware updates so it's fairly future proof.
Why are you referring to OLPC in the past tense? The organization hasn't lived up to it's goals, but they have shipped around half a million laptops to kids around the world. The Linux-based Sugar software continues to improve and there are many volunteers contributing to the project. The organization got a lot flak when Negroponte announced the Windows XP port, but many volunteers and employees put their bad feelings aside and continue to work on the project. Now Sugar Labs (the software spinoff) is branching out in order to incorporate their software in other Linux distributions. There are also several ports underway to put Sugar on other laptops and embedded devices.
And it wasn't designed in some out of touch lab. It was designed for harsh environments, limited internet connectivity, intermittent electrical power, bright sunlight readability, and children with no previous knowledge of computers. I think the XO-1 is a remarkable piece of hardware.
I used to work for Motorola, and I can attest that the standard 3 bar battery gauge showed:
50% of the battery life at 3 bars
30% at 2 bars
15% at 1 bar
5% at 0 bars
And yes, this was customizable by the carrier to make it better or worse. Of course, this is hard to prove to the sceptics unless the software is open source.
There are numerous other technical reasons why the gauges might not be accurate, but this is a big factor.
Actually, the Fedora based LiveCD is out of date and there are better options available. More details can be found on the OLPC wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/LiveCd
This article makes a lot of claims and doesn't back them up.
3G phones have better spectral efficiency than 2G phones, so they transmit less power for a given amount of data. For a given web page, this means a 3G phone will consume less power if all other parts of the system are equivalent. However most 3G phones have faster processors which offset this to some extent. The peak currents in a 3G phone will be higher because it can transmit data faster, and this means you can drain your battery faster if you are using it extensively.
Another important fact is that actual bandwidths can be far less than advertised ones due to the error correction used in both EDGE and 3G networks. If you are far from the base station it will reduce your effective bandwidth until your bit error rate is acceptably low. Thus real world EDGE speeds are less than 200 kbps.
EDGE also supports multislot which uses several time slots to increase speeds. Some networks might support class 8 EDGE while other support class 12. For a better explanation look at http://www.gsmworld.com/technology/gprs/class.shtml. The article talks about GPRS but applies to EDGE as well.
IAAEE as well and I work on cell phones. Please don't just accept rubish claims without any factual evidence.
Sure, see Asa's blog: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007682 .html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007860 .html
If something isn't broke, why break it by upgrading? MySQL is constantly changing little details about how their DB works... take a look at a random page in their documentation and you will see notes like "in 4.x.x we changed this" all over the place. 5.0 sounds like it will be a very feature rich database (Yay, triggers!) but it will be a probably be a pain to upgrade. Little quirks that I've relied upon will no longer work that way. Maybe after this release, things will start to stabilize. Doubtful though.
And as far as education goes, many people are too computer illiterate to understand this. This is how viruses continue to spread via email years after they first appeared. Some people do not learn how or why they spread. Many people don't even know when their computer has a virus on it! If only msconfig was a household term :-P
720 kbps is more than capable for high quality voice. The issues that keep Bluetooth headset quality low are poor acoustics and frequency interference. Bluetooth 1.2 supports Adaptive Frequency Hopping and Enhanced Voice Processing which adds some error correction. But most phones are still Bluetooth 1.1 Part of the problem is that phones are marketed simply as Bluetooth devices, when in reality there are quite a few different profiles that devices can support and several versions of the Bluetooth standard.