False dichotomy. There are other foundations and NGOs that build schools and hire teachers. Negroponte, being the techhead that he is, wants to distribute laptops. If they help kids with their math and reading, then more power to him.
Sure we *can* do both, but how effective are the laptops going to be? You're not going to turn a shitty educational system into a good one by throwing cheap laptops at it.
Keep in mind that lots of these laptops are going to places where they already do have schools and teachers, but they cannot afford to provide computers for the students. This is where the program steps in. As for your fundamental question of how having PCs will improve education, in these cases, it will improve education in the same manner that having access to PCs improved our education. Sure, we could have done with pads of paper and pens, but it would have righteously sucked.
That's kind of my point. For the $150 that each laptop costs, you could buy a shitload of pens, papers and books. It would "righteously suck" for you because you're a technology addicted tard, but for most of the intended audience it would be a huge step up.
How does DRM even apply here? Because the kids won't be able to make copies of the stuff they're buying from iTunes? Because they can't make copies of games and DVDs for their friends? If they're running into DRM, odds are that they're not using the computers for their intended purpose.
Somebody else brought up DRM, and then somebody else replied to it, and then I replied to them. If you want to know why it's relevant, ask the original poster.
I don't really see how laptops will improve education anyway. Wasn't the goal to give these to kids in areas that don't even have electricity all the time? Instead of pouring money into laptops, wouldn't it be better to pour money into building schools and infrastructure and hiring teachers? Sounds like a better investment IMO.
In any case, I think DRM is bad in an educational setting. Do you really want kids learning that DRM is just the way it's done?
My point was, most places will start with service level X and frequent customers might eventually get the better service level X+1.
What Amazon is doing is starting with service level X for everybody, and then going the other way. Frequent customers still get X, but infrequent customers get X-1.
The results are just about the same, but they've chosen a funny way of going about it. "Really good service for frequent customers is too expensive, so lets just provide even shittier service to infrequent customers and treat the frequent ones the same way."
Please stay with Gentoo I don't want users like you infecting the other distros.
I think you've got the infection backwards. If you're ever having a problem on Linux, 99.999% of the time your best bet is to ask a Gentoo or Slackware user.
Snicker at their elitism, but fact of the matter is your average Gentoo user probably knows 100x more about Linux than your average Ubuntu user.
I think you're missing the point. Yes, what China is doing is horrible. But it's not congress's job to fix China. Meanwhile, we have our own problems, which congress should be working on, because it *is* their job to fix them, and they're not doing it.
The user's lack of education *is* the root problem. There has always been and will always be people out there trying to rip off and do harm to other people, whether it's legal or not. If this passes, spyware will still be rampant, the only difference will be that we've wasted millions of tax payer dollars trying to fix it.
Trusting a government organization to fix anything is a mistake. We'll be lucky if they don't mandate Windows so that their "FTC approved" spyware checker can run.
No offense, but that's pretty lame. Chemistry sets are fun because they're hand on.
This is just getting ridiculous. I can go down the block and fill my car with 30 gallons of highly flamable/explosive gasoline, but chemistry sets are off limits because they contain a few ounces of potentially dangerous chemicals? Our government is officially retarded.
What the hell do you do on the internet that's so "dangerous"? I'm trying to see your side, but I'm really struggling. If you're posting legitimate content (eg not trolling), who cares if your future employer finds it? What're they gonna say? "This guy strives for accuracy and correctness, let's keep looking"? or maybe "This guy is a little too knowledgeable"?
Even if they discriminate against you, who cares? Do you really want to work for somebody who wouldn't have hired you because they disagree with something you do in your personal time? You're better off not working with people like that anyway.
Forcing people to use their real names is pointless, but I just can't see how it'd cause harm. It's not like Wikipedia and Citizendium are whistle blowing sites.
You do realize we're talking about Windows? The operating system that invented the "wizard" to guide idiots through "complicated" setup procedures? Windows' target audience is the technologically incompetent user, and the best way to woo those users is by hiding all the "complicated" details. Shit, you can't even upgrade your own drivers without it deactivating itself. And god forbid you do something really crazy, like upgrading your hardware.
Microsoft's goal is to make using the computer just like using the TV. It's working well for them, but it's not "geeky".
I have upgraded to Vista because I am a geek, actually
Vista is the anti-thesis of geekiness. Everything is hidden away for the sole purpose of making sure you don't play with it and can't see how it works. All the details are hidden behind a wall of eye-candy meant to prevent you from probing too far. The idea is anathema to true geekiness.
It's sad times when every tard with an iPod considers themselves a "geek".
No idea on IE, but Konqueror has a similar feature to Firefox. I can double click the word, right click, and get a small menu with the options "Search for '%s' with Google" and a "Search for '%s' with >" option that brings up a list of all the search engines I've added. The "Search for '%s' with Google" uses the default search engine, it just happens to be Google in my case.
Close, but not quite. After the initial investment to create the game, producing the media and bandwidth to download/play is close to zero. As long as they sell any games at any amount over a couple bucks, they're making more money than they would be otherwise. It's the same reason airlines will often offer really cheap seats on flights with a lot of empty space. They may not make the full ticket price, but it's better than not making anything at all off those seats.
Translating a game to a different languages costs significantly less than creating the game in the first place. A whole lot less than 1/5th the original cost. Once sales from the translated game recoups the small translation cost, they're not necessarily making a profit, but they're making money they wouldn't be otherwise.
That doesn't make the huge price difference any less stupid, but I'm almost certain that's why they're doing it.
Consider yourself fortunate. Since Comcast took over Adelphia I've had a couple of half month long outages and dramatically reduced speed. Not to mention that their tech support staff can only be described as incompetent. And that's being nice.
But of course my only other option is 1/6th the speed for the same price.
At one point I had full XFCE desktop and latest (at the time) 2.6.xx kernel running in under 35 MB. That was a few months ago.
But I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't a typical install. I was going more for speed, but I compiled the kernel with exactly the set of drivers/modules I needed; and compiled X, XFCE, and most "important" system libraries myself. Base distro was Slackware.
I'm running a fairly standard Debian install right now, and with no apps running it'll use about 150 MB with X, Fluxbox, and some fairly "standard" background services.
I'll also point out that the 35 MB Slackware was running on a 32-bit Pentium 4, and this Debian install is running on AMD64. Doesn't make much difference, but enough that I thought I should point it out.
150000 people die every day. That's almost 2 a second. I'm sure the family and friends of these 6 are heart broken, but for the 6.5 billion people who don't know them, it's not all that remarkable.
The only thing unique about these 6 people is that they died in a somewhat amusing way. If you want to mourn, mourn for the other 149994 people who died today that you'll never hear about.
If everything a user needs runs nicely on XP and they have no major issues with the OS, then why the fuck should they 'upgrade' to a new OS?
Oh we should all 'upgrade' because M$ decided we should? fuck that. I'm sure there will be many users (and probably some businesses) installing pirate copies of XP long after M$ ceased selling it because the users know the ins/outs of the OS and all the programs they need run just fine on it and the cost of buying Vista plus extra ram and/or a new processor or even a whole new computer is too much - especially if your company runs tens/hundreds of XP machines.
More or less, yes. It doesn't matter if everyone uses pirated XP after MS stops selling it, because you'll still be paying for Vista when you buy a new PC. Microsoft loves that, because it allows them to continue raking in $$$, claim Vista sales are at an all-time high and at the same time claim piracy is rampant so they can justify even more draconian "anti-piracy" measures in Vista++.
Besides that, your plan simply won't work in the long run. It only works right now because you can get drivers and software. In a couple years, you won't be able to get XP drivers and you'll run to whatever OS has them. And guess what that's going to be? The driver manufacturers will see outstanding Vista sales (see paragraph above), so they'll make Vista drivers.
And the idea of legit companies using pirated Windows is hilarious. Visit the "real world" much? One disgruntled employee, and Microsoft would fucking own you. Literally. That's one risk most businesses don't like taking.
So holdout all you want, but you're just fooling yourself. You'll give in soon enough.
Will you Windows people stop whining? In the next few years you're going to use Vista, because that's Microsoft's new thing. People whined about XP, and look where we are now. So get on with it. Stop whining and take the plunge. We all know how it's going to turn out, and the rest of us are tired of your bitching.
Alternatively, try switching to a different operating system. For years the most common reasons for not switching to Linux or Mac have been that those operating systems don't support necessary hardware or software and are significantly different than people are used to. Now that Microsoft's own "new thing" is significantly different and doesn't support much hardware or software, it's the perfect time to put your money where your mouth is. Switch to something else, or shut up and take it.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently not that long. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/29/gmail_vuln/
Sure we *can* do both, but how effective are the laptops going to be? You're not going to turn a shitty educational system into a good one by throwing cheap laptops at it.
That's kind of my point. For the $150 that each laptop costs, you could buy a shitload of pens, papers and books. It would "righteously suck" for you because you're a technology addicted tard, but for most of the intended audience it would be a huge step up.
Somebody else brought up DRM, and then somebody else replied to it, and then I replied to them. If you want to know why it's relevant, ask the original poster.
I don't really see how laptops will improve education anyway. Wasn't the goal to give these to kids in areas that don't even have electricity all the time? Instead of pouring money into laptops, wouldn't it be better to pour money into building schools and infrastructure and hiring teachers? Sounds like a better investment IMO.
In any case, I think DRM is bad in an educational setting. Do you really want kids learning that DRM is just the way it's done?
In any case, Amazon is doing it wrong.
My point was, most places will start with service level X and frequent customers might eventually get the better service level X+1.
What Amazon is doing is starting with service level X for everybody, and then going the other way. Frequent customers still get X, but infrequent customers get X-1.
The results are just about the same, but they've chosen a funny way of going about it. "Really good service for frequent customers is too expensive, so lets just provide even shittier service to infrequent customers and treat the frequent ones the same way."
Yeah, it really seems they got it backwards.
Lots of places treat frequent customers better, not many make it a point to treat infrequent customers worse.
I think you've got the infection backwards. If you're ever having a problem on Linux, 99.999% of the time your best bet is to ask a Gentoo or Slackware user.
Snicker at their elitism, but fact of the matter is your average Gentoo user probably knows 100x more about Linux than your average Ubuntu user.
The real question is, if it were filled with DVDs, how many libraries of congress would it hold?
Yeah, mods are on crack or something. If you use the user stylesheets, you can even block Google's search result ads in Opera. No add ons required.
I think you're missing the point. Yes, what China is doing is horrible. But it's not congress's job to fix China. Meanwhile, we have our own problems, which congress should be working on, because it *is* their job to fix them, and they're not doing it.
The user's lack of education *is* the root problem. There has always been and will always be people out there trying to rip off and do harm to other people, whether it's legal or not. If this passes, spyware will still be rampant, the only difference will be that we've wasted millions of tax payer dollars trying to fix it.
Trusting a government organization to fix anything is a mistake. We'll be lucky if they don't mandate Windows so that their "FTC approved" spyware checker can run.
No offense, but that's pretty lame. Chemistry sets are fun because they're hand on.
This is just getting ridiculous. I can go down the block and fill my car with 30 gallons of highly flamable/explosive gasoline, but chemistry sets are off limits because they contain a few ounces of potentially dangerous chemicals? Our government is officially retarded.
What the hell do you do on the internet that's so "dangerous"? I'm trying to see your side, but I'm really struggling. If you're posting legitimate content (eg not trolling), who cares if your future employer finds it? What're they gonna say? "This guy strives for accuracy and correctness, let's keep looking"? or maybe "This guy is a little too knowledgeable"?
Even if they discriminate against you, who cares? Do you really want to work for somebody who wouldn't have hired you because they disagree with something you do in your personal time? You're better off not working with people like that anyway.
Forcing people to use their real names is pointless, but I just can't see how it'd cause harm. It's not like Wikipedia and Citizendium are whistle blowing sites.
You do realize we're talking about Windows? The operating system that invented the "wizard" to guide idiots through "complicated" setup procedures? Windows' target audience is the technologically incompetent user, and the best way to woo those users is by hiding all the "complicated" details. Shit, you can't even upgrade your own drivers without it deactivating itself. And god forbid you do something really crazy, like upgrading your hardware.
Microsoft's goal is to make using the computer just like using the TV. It's working well for them, but it's not "geeky".
Vista is the anti-thesis of geekiness. Everything is hidden away for the sole purpose of making sure you don't play with it and can't see how it works. All the details are hidden behind a wall of eye-candy meant to prevent you from probing too far. The idea is anathema to true geekiness.
It's sad times when every tard with an iPod considers themselves a "geek".
Not only that, these drives are easy to lose and misplace. Incompetently losing massive amounts of data has never been so easy!
No idea on IE, but Konqueror has a similar feature to Firefox. I can double click the word, right click, and get a small menu with the options "Search for '%s' with Google" and a "Search for '%s' with >" option that brings up a list of all the search engines I've added. The "Search for '%s' with Google" uses the default search engine, it just happens to be Google in my case.
Gees, talk about missing the obvious: Concast.
Close, but not quite. After the initial investment to create the game, producing the media and bandwidth to download/play is close to zero. As long as they sell any games at any amount over a couple bucks, they're making more money than they would be otherwise. It's the same reason airlines will often offer really cheap seats on flights with a lot of empty space. They may not make the full ticket price, but it's better than not making anything at all off those seats.
Translating a game to a different languages costs significantly less than creating the game in the first place. A whole lot less than 1/5th the original cost. Once sales from the translated game recoups the small translation cost, they're not necessarily making a profit, but they're making money they wouldn't be otherwise.
That doesn't make the huge price difference any less stupid, but I'm almost certain that's why they're doing it.
Doesn't Microsoft usually end up paying out with these things? My proposition:
I'm not saying Microsoft is right, but I wouldn't mind making a few bucks helping them be wrong.
Where did the GP say they needed to upgrade? He simply said the hardware specs aren't that great, and they aren't.
Consider yourself fortunate. Since Comcast took over Adelphia I've had a couple of half month long outages and dramatically reduced speed. Not to mention that their tech support staff can only be described as incompetent. And that's being nice.
But of course my only other option is 1/6th the speed for the same price.
At one point I had full XFCE desktop and latest (at the time) 2.6.xx kernel running in under 35 MB. That was a few months ago.
But I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't a typical install. I was going more for speed, but I compiled the kernel with exactly the set of drivers/modules I needed; and compiled X, XFCE, and most "important" system libraries myself. Base distro was Slackware.
I'm running a fairly standard Debian install right now, and with no apps running it'll use about 150 MB with X, Fluxbox, and some fairly "standard" background services.
I'll also point out that the 35 MB Slackware was running on a 32-bit Pentium 4, and this Debian install is running on AMD64. Doesn't make much difference, but enough that I thought I should point it out.
150000 people die every day. That's almost 2 a second. I'm sure the family and friends of these 6 are heart broken, but for the 6.5 billion people who don't know them, it's not all that remarkable.
The only thing unique about these 6 people is that they died in a somewhat amusing way. If you want to mourn, mourn for the other 149994 people who died today that you'll never hear about.
More or less, yes. It doesn't matter if everyone uses pirated XP after MS stops selling it, because you'll still be paying for Vista when you buy a new PC. Microsoft loves that, because it allows them to continue raking in $$$, claim Vista sales are at an all-time high and at the same time claim piracy is rampant so they can justify even more draconian "anti-piracy" measures in Vista++.
Besides that, your plan simply won't work in the long run. It only works right now because you can get drivers and software. In a couple years, you won't be able to get XP drivers and you'll run to whatever OS has them. And guess what that's going to be? The driver manufacturers will see outstanding Vista sales (see paragraph above), so they'll make Vista drivers.
And the idea of legit companies using pirated Windows is hilarious. Visit the "real world" much? One disgruntled employee, and Microsoft would fucking own you. Literally. That's one risk most businesses don't like taking.
So holdout all you want, but you're just fooling yourself. You'll give in soon enough.
Will you Windows people stop whining? In the next few years you're going to use Vista, because that's Microsoft's new thing. People whined about XP, and look where we are now. So get on with it. Stop whining and take the plunge. We all know how it's going to turn out, and the rest of us are tired of your bitching.
Alternatively, try switching to a different operating system. For years the most common reasons for not switching to Linux or Mac have been that those operating systems don't support necessary hardware or software and are significantly different than people are used to. Now that Microsoft's own "new thing" is significantly different and doesn't support much hardware or software, it's the perfect time to put your money where your mouth is. Switch to something else, or shut up and take it.