You make a good point. I was focusing on the laptop itself, and not on the possibility of using the laptop to access information on the net. I'd assumed that the laptop was going to be stand-alone, but if the program also worked to add ubiquitous net access, I agree that it could help undo all the information inequities which probably exacerbate poverty. I'm still not sold on education, but you make a very good point about it helping fight poverty.
I think the OP's point was that the governments in those countries should fix their own educational system rather than one lab at MIT taking upon themselves to rejigger the educational system in other people's countries. It's not about specialization. Of course the governments wouldn't attempt IT work, or whatever. They subcontract whatever they deem needed to be done.
I think the OP's point was about the ability and appropriateness of a technocrat at MIT to figure out how to educate third world children. The hand crank should've given that away. My guess is Negroponte is taking a shot at continued relevence after everybody seems to have forgotten about him and the media lab. As somebody else said, if he really cared he'd fix more pressing problems. It's typical first world centrism to think the way to help others is to turn them into us. They need to go through a natural progression, and that progression involves stabilizing their economies and getting infrastructure in place before we start handing out unix to children.
Not sure you understand the definition of either strawman or dumbass. I'm not sure why you thought I was making a petty semantic argument, but I assume you did since that's all you replied with. For the record, I don't see how it will help, either, which should've been obvious from my post.
Citing Governments or the UN and the MIT Media Lab doesn't really sway me. The Media Lab is the temple of technology for technologies' sake and they are not exactly the people to look to for objective opinions on the use of tech in education. And what the fuck does the UN know about education? They can't even get rice to people that need it.
If you want to argue for yourself instead of dropping names, I'd honestly love to know why you think having a laptop would help poor kids learn better than spending the $100 on other things. My feeling is that all it will help with is learning how to use a specific computer OS and the software on it. Maybe that's all you can hope for, and we're just training these kids to run their linux workstations at Dell tech support India. But that doesn't seem to be the noble aspiration of the program. I'm perfectly willing to be swayed by arguments contrary, but calling me names probably isn't going to do the trick.
Hey, maybe it will fail. But I'll take a million failed startup companies over one more law firm. I'm not being superior, but simply negative about the effect of lawyers on society. I wouldn't put engineers on a pedestal above garbage men. We're all helping. Hell, the world would be a miserable, dry place if everybody were engineers. But the world would stop functioning if we were all lawyers, the majority of whom are parasitic wastes of space taking advantage of a corrupt system of their own design. (I'm simply talking in terms of society here. As individuals they run the gamut, of course, like everybody else, though you do have to raise an eyebrow at people who decide to devote their professional lives to cutting up the pie--while taking a third for themselves--instead of making it bigger.)
Anyway, don't be so sore. You should just take the inevitable vituperation towards your profession as a small price to pay for leaching off productive society. And if you're one of a few good lawyers who we actually need, then get mad not at me but at your fellow attorneys for giving the profession such a well deserved notoriety.
Come on. Since when do you need a laptop to get educated? That's a bunch of self-serving modern bullshit that can only be said with a straight face in rich white American school districts, the same ones that use iPods to teach kids French while their math scores get lower and lower. We needn't inflict that on others. If you can't see the absolute ludicrousness of a kid cranking away on a laptop (literally) while he's sitting inside a school with a barely functioning roof and old textbooks and an overworked teacher, perhaps it's you who needs to grasp something.
Because of finite resources. Or did you think that the starvation in Africa was because they just could figure out how to balance work and home? If somebody is willing to spare $100 for a laptop in Africa, they should just save their time and buy $100 worth of infrastructure for food and water.
Quite the opposite. Everybody in science now knows that slapping the meaningless tag 'nano' in front of whatever you're doing will increase your chances of being funded by the lemmings who run the grant agencies. Of course, this applied to everybody since everything under the sun is made of small particles of SOMETHING and so the term is abused like a Hilton. It's really ridiculous. In the future, perhaps we'll have "Diamond Age"-like machines that are truly nanoscale but right now I think it's a bit contrived to talk about nanotechnology when all you mean is good 'ol materials science, which has ALWAYS been nanoscale in the sense that atoms and molecules haven't changed size.
Your federal tax rate is *not* 35%. You would have to make an infinite amount of money to pay 35% to the federal gavernment. Only the income you make over $326,450 is taxed at 35%. The vast majority of people make less than $150k and pay less than 28%. It you're making enough money to be paying over 28%, you've hit the FICA cap, and you're not going to see any FICA savings from your deductions.
I think his point is well taken. What matters when making a decision is your marginal tax rate (which is why progressive taxation is so counterproductive in many ways). Even though his overall tax rate is much less, the government sees fit to make sure that he's minimally induced to produce further output. His marginal rate is probably actually higher than he quoted, since it's really difficult to find all the ways the government bilks you through fees and sales taxes. Assuming you're actually planning to spend the marginal money you earn, you are probably only getting about a third of it in the end. When you work for three weeks and two weeks of your production is taken from you by the government, I'd say we should be throwing shit into a harbor somewhere...
Like most lawyers I know, you seem to miss the possibility for more than one option to exist in the world. (That's why you guys make such great politicians.) But the world of engineering is about increasing the number of possibilities, quite unlike the zero sum game from which most lawyers skim off the top. It's quite reasonable to suppose that there are times when having a laptop that has both wireless connectivity AND a static snapshot of the more useful parts of the net would be fantastic. For example, maybe in the airport you connect and grab e-mail but once you get on the airplane it would still be nice to have last weeks snapshot of the internet available to you while on the flight. There will always be times when the internet is unavailable, either through technical problems or the realities of your location. Having another, albeit lesser, option is always nice and these guys are trying to provide that.
Utter BS. Linux still has to catch up to Windows in terms of usability. Let's wait until that happens before we talk about Apple. Personally, I think this whole fiction about linux nearly approaching the same usability as Windows is a joke perpetrated by nerds who have absolutely no ability to empathize with somebody who isn't an expert user. People forget all the bullshit linux makes you do when things go wrong and get way too self congratulatory about the stuff that goes right. You can have a system that is as nicely open and community built as linux is (which i love) or you can have a system that is easy to use. I don't think you can have both. It's a trade-off. The hacked nature of linux makes it inherently less static and less uniform than Windows or OS X. That's good. But it's not conducive to a simple user experience.
Maybe linux is ready for the corporate desktop when you've got IT people running around. But we're a long way from my grandmother using a linux box, and she does just fine with a windows machine. And if you ask me, you'd have to neuter linux to make it usable by my grandmother. So why are we running around acting as if the greatest thing in the world would be if linux were just like windows? Ridiculous.
Here's why you may be wrong. Microsoft has more nerd capital than anybody. Up till now, however, that's been their achilles heal since so many people working on a product with so many inter-dependencies created a combinatorial software cluster fuck that probably left 90% of their programmers fixing the work of 10%. Now that they've finally discovered (!) the notion that software should be, above all else, modular and composed of well defined parts interacting in well defined ways, they may actually be able to effectively leverage their massive human capital to start producing decent product.
I think to a certain extent Apple gets this, but they also aren't as ambitious as Microsoft. Apple is content to produce pretty and easy to use, if not very powerful, software. Whereas MS aims for a symantic database file system, Apple throws together the functional but anemic Spotlight, for example. As long as Microsoft is unable to do anything other than bulky and buggy, Apple wins. But Microsoft's abilities may eventually catch up to their ambitions, and if so, Apple will lose.
What you're trying to say is that they can design, but they can't engineer. They are too much "black turtleneck" not enough "pocket protector". I think they used to be more balanced, but I think they are still suffering from the well publicized brain-drain that occurred in the 90s. Now that Avi is gone, I think they are further screwed in that department.
However, what's very interesting is how well they do given their technical incompetence relative to other companies. For example, despite the fact that iPods are rather badly engineered (they seem to hard reboot every other time you turn them on, they have display and interface glitches, even in later generations, early problems with battery life, etc.) they are the most popular out there. I think design is vastly underestimated. People (including me) would rather work with glitchy but well designed than solid but shittily so.
Having said that, I don't think Apple can slide much more into glitchy than they already are before it starts to hurt them. Microsoft, which has always been glitchy AND badly designed, may eventually get over the glitchy part, and people may get tired of overpaying for buggy products.
The general decline in parenting has depressed me, too, and has made me not want to have kids. However, recently I've been turning around on the whole issue. In fact, now I love it. Do you know how easy it is going to be for me to get my kids into a good school and a successful life with all the fuck-ups out there raising their kids on TV and day care? Hell, I used to think raising a kid would be difficult. Now that the bar is so unbefuckingleivably low, I'm not really worried. You actually give a shit about your kids and keep off the pipe while they're around and they'll get into Yale, easy.
I can't wait until US News and World's College Rankings adds a column for "Literacy Rate of Incoming Freshmen".
Well, I'm not sure you've convinced me that linux is ready to replace windows entirely, at least not for me, though I'm starting to have a healthy respect for people who are able to get buy without ever using windows. I'd be even more swayed if I saw high quality work that came from a linux-only user. I'm not saying linux-only folks can't or don't, but in the end I think that's what it comes down to. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any, though that may just be entirely due to the relative scarcity of people I know who only use linux.
Well, I can't help it if the people who do computer UIs don't know what translucency is.:-) The definition of translucent is diffuse transparency (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent) so when people were referring to the vista effect as translucency (which it is) I assumed we were all on the same page. Anyway, I agree with you that Quartz should be able to do it, too.
What, are you arguing symantics? I defined what I meant by translucent in my post, so there's really no point in your arguing my own definition (which, for the record, is reasonable based on the normal usage of the word translucent). Or are you saying that Vista doesn't actually do blurring on top of transparency, whatever the hell you want to call it? As far as I know, there is no way for the compositor in the mac environment to do blurring. In vista, when you move a window the stuff beneath the translucent part will be blurred in real time. I don't think that's possible in OS X, but I could be mistaken.
Just a quibble, but OS X can't do translucency, it can only do transparency. Vista apparenty can do both, with tranlucency being transparency with some blurring. Now, I don't know why you'd WANT to do those stupid translucency effects, but it does make the stuff behind less distracting. So does turning down the transparency, which is what they should've done. As usual, Microsoft shows that they have absolutely no sense of elegance. Vista is going to be nice technically (perhaps) but they will completely miss on the look and feel, as usual.
I think you'll have to wait to see if they're still crashing in 2007 to call it Vista. Maybe XP SP3 is a better name for something that crashes this year.
i hightly doubt you've actually looked at the source code to mozilla... maybe i'm mistaken, but as far as i could tell it was mostly netscape stuff. in fact, wasn't gecko large done while netscape was still around?
Sorry, you're absolutely right if the software in question has an RPM package. I was thinking of the still very typical configure, make, make install deal that hoses your file system with softwaren in a decidely entropic way.
In any case though you are talking about a TINY percentage of computer users here. How many people need matlab, mathemetica AND photoshop?
Lots of people. Regardless, most people have a niche, and I'm saying I'd be really surprised if free software was usually the best option for that niche. If all you're talking about is soccer moms writing e-mails and surfing for recipes, then why the heck are we even bothering to have this conversation? We might as well freeze all software development.
Even if GIMP developers dedicated the next five years to replicating photoshop down to the smallest detail you would still be here whining about how it was two miliseconds slower or that the toolbar icon was two pixels offset to the right.
You're really taking liberties with my position. There is often nothing subtle about the difference in quality between an OSS and its commerical counterpart. Do you think the people that choose to pay for Excel are stupid, or do you think perhaps they know something you don't about the wisdom of sweating a few hundred dollars when dealing with the productivity of an employee costing a hundred thousand? If you save five minutes a day due to faster calculations, Excel pays for itself.
Don't take this the wrong way but I don't think there is anything any open source developer can do to make you and people like you happy. Why even try?
I hope they do it because it's fun. Otherwise, yeah, it's a pretty stupid enterprise. Having all software development duplicated is wasteful, and software costs really aren't dominating expenses for a company. Plus, there's no such thing as free as in beer software. You can give away software, but it wasn't free. At the very least it costs in lost productivity of programming talent that could be more efficiently allocated. Does it help society to have TWO parallel developments of MS Word, just so that a company can save %0.1 of it's budget? None of this makes sense to me except that it's fun to write software. As an economic argument, it's a total loser. If the entire OSS movement is based solely on stinginess then it's a collosal waste of time. Costs always find a way to make themselves known, so OSS is only justified if it results in better products. So far, I think the jury is out on that.
I agree, but then you're still tied to the Windows world and therefore must care about it. If you use a windows partition or CrossOver, it's all the same with regard to my original point, I think.
You have access to programs like Illustrator or Photoshop. Especially the former, because I can't think of any free vector drawing tool that comes within a mile of Illustrator for producing high quality graphics. Even if all you want to do is show some plots, you'll get better output from commercial tools like Igor or SigmaPlot. In my opinion, OSS has been very weak in terms of graphics. My guess is that since OSS is controlled largely by what geeks want to play with, and not what the market needs, you end up with stuff that only goes so far. I think to get something like illustrator you have to do a shitload of boring as hell work. It's not all gimicks and filter effects. And you need to do research. OSS projects just don't have the discipline or resources to compete with someone like Adobe.
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You make a good point. I was focusing on the laptop itself, and not on the possibility of using the laptop to access information on the net. I'd assumed that the laptop was going to be stand-alone, but if the program also worked to add ubiquitous net access, I agree that it could help undo all the information inequities which probably exacerbate poverty. I'm still not sold on education, but you make a very good point about it helping fight poverty.
I think the OP's point was about the ability and appropriateness of a technocrat at MIT to figure out how to educate third world children. The hand crank should've given that away. My guess is Negroponte is taking a shot at continued relevence after everybody seems to have forgotten about him and the media lab. As somebody else said, if he really cared he'd fix more pressing problems. It's typical first world centrism to think the way to help others is to turn them into us. They need to go through a natural progression, and that progression involves stabilizing their economies and getting infrastructure in place before we start handing out unix to children.
Citing Governments or the UN and the MIT Media Lab doesn't really sway me. The Media Lab is the temple of technology for technologies' sake and they are not exactly the people to look to for objective opinions on the use of tech in education. And what the fuck does the UN know about education? They can't even get rice to people that need it.
If you want to argue for yourself instead of dropping names, I'd honestly love to know why you think having a laptop would help poor kids learn better than spending the $100 on other things. My feeling is that all it will help with is learning how to use a specific computer OS and the software on it. Maybe that's all you can hope for, and we're just training these kids to run their linux workstations at Dell tech support India. But that doesn't seem to be the noble aspiration of the program. I'm perfectly willing to be swayed by arguments contrary, but calling me names probably isn't going to do the trick.
Anyway, don't be so sore. You should just take the inevitable vituperation towards your profession as a small price to pay for leaching off productive society. And if you're one of a few good lawyers who we actually need, then get mad not at me but at your fellow attorneys for giving the profession such a well deserved notoriety.
Come on. Since when do you need a laptop to get educated? That's a bunch of self-serving modern bullshit that can only be said with a straight face in rich white American school districts, the same ones that use iPods to teach kids French while their math scores get lower and lower. We needn't inflict that on others. If you can't see the absolute ludicrousness of a kid cranking away on a laptop (literally) while he's sitting inside a school with a barely functioning roof and old textbooks and an overworked teacher, perhaps it's you who needs to grasp something.
Because of finite resources. Or did you think that the starvation in Africa was because they just could figure out how to balance work and home? If somebody is willing to spare $100 for a laptop in Africa, they should just save their time and buy $100 worth of infrastructure for food and water.
Quite the opposite. Everybody in science now knows that slapping the meaningless tag 'nano' in front of whatever you're doing will increase your chances of being funded by the lemmings who run the grant agencies. Of course, this applied to everybody since everything under the sun is made of small particles of SOMETHING and so the term is abused like a Hilton. It's really ridiculous. In the future, perhaps we'll have "Diamond Age"-like machines that are truly nanoscale but right now I think it's a bit contrived to talk about nanotechnology when all you mean is good 'ol materials science, which has ALWAYS been nanoscale in the sense that atoms and molecules haven't changed size.
I think his point is well taken. What matters when making a decision is your marginal tax rate (which is why progressive taxation is so counterproductive in many ways). Even though his overall tax rate is much less, the government sees fit to make sure that he's minimally induced to produce further output. His marginal rate is probably actually higher than he quoted, since it's really difficult to find all the ways the government bilks you through fees and sales taxes. Assuming you're actually planning to spend the marginal money you earn, you are probably only getting about a third of it in the end. When you work for three weeks and two weeks of your production is taken from you by the government, I'd say we should be throwing shit into a harbor somewhere...
Like most lawyers I know, you seem to miss the possibility for more than one option to exist in the world. (That's why you guys make such great politicians.) But the world of engineering is about increasing the number of possibilities, quite unlike the zero sum game from which most lawyers skim off the top. It's quite reasonable to suppose that there are times when having a laptop that has both wireless connectivity AND a static snapshot of the more useful parts of the net would be fantastic. For example, maybe in the airport you connect and grab e-mail but once you get on the airplane it would still be nice to have last weeks snapshot of the internet available to you while on the flight. There will always be times when the internet is unavailable, either through technical problems or the realities of your location. Having another, albeit lesser, option is always nice and these guys are trying to provide that.
Maybe linux is ready for the corporate desktop when you've got IT people running around. But we're a long way from my grandmother using a linux box, and she does just fine with a windows machine. And if you ask me, you'd have to neuter linux to make it usable by my grandmother. So why are we running around acting as if the greatest thing in the world would be if linux were just like windows? Ridiculous.
I think to a certain extent Apple gets this, but they also aren't as ambitious as Microsoft. Apple is content to produce pretty and easy to use, if not very powerful, software. Whereas MS aims for a symantic database file system, Apple throws together the functional but anemic Spotlight, for example. As long as Microsoft is unable to do anything other than bulky and buggy, Apple wins. But Microsoft's abilities may eventually catch up to their ambitions, and if so, Apple will lose.
However, what's very interesting is how well they do given their technical incompetence relative to other companies. For example, despite the fact that iPods are rather badly engineered (they seem to hard reboot every other time you turn them on, they have display and interface glitches, even in later generations, early problems with battery life, etc.) they are the most popular out there. I think design is vastly underestimated. People (including me) would rather work with glitchy but well designed than solid but shittily so.
Having said that, I don't think Apple can slide much more into glitchy than they already are before it starts to hurt them. Microsoft, which has always been glitchy AND badly designed, may eventually get over the glitchy part, and people may get tired of overpaying for buggy products.
I can't wait until US News and World's College Rankings adds a column for "Literacy Rate of Incoming Freshmen".
Well, I'm not sure you've convinced me that linux is ready to replace windows entirely, at least not for me, though I'm starting to have a healthy respect for people who are able to get buy without ever using windows. I'd be even more swayed if I saw high quality work that came from a linux-only user. I'm not saying linux-only folks can't or don't, but in the end I think that's what it comes down to. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any, though that may just be entirely due to the relative scarcity of people I know who only use linux.
I'm not sure what dictionary you're using, but every definition I find says something that is translucent diffuses or obscures.
Well, I can't help it if the people who do computer UIs don't know what translucency is. :-) The definition of translucent is diffuse transparency (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent) so when people were referring to the vista effect as translucency (which it is) I assumed we were all on the same page. Anyway, I agree with you that Quartz should be able to do it, too.
What, are you arguing symantics? I defined what I meant by translucent in my post, so there's really no point in your arguing my own definition (which, for the record, is reasonable based on the normal usage of the word translucent). Or are you saying that Vista doesn't actually do blurring on top of transparency, whatever the hell you want to call it? As far as I know, there is no way for the compositor in the mac environment to do blurring. In vista, when you move a window the stuff beneath the translucent part will be blurred in real time. I don't think that's possible in OS X, but I could be mistaken.
Just a quibble, but OS X can't do translucency, it can only do transparency. Vista apparenty can do both, with tranlucency being transparency with some blurring. Now, I don't know why you'd WANT to do those stupid translucency effects, but it does make the stuff behind less distracting. So does turning down the transparency, which is what they should've done. As usual, Microsoft shows that they have absolutely no sense of elegance. Vista is going to be nice technically (perhaps) but they will completely miss on the look and feel, as usual.
I think you'll have to wait to see if they're still crashing in 2007 to call it Vista. Maybe XP SP3 is a better name for something that crashes this year.
i hightly doubt you've actually looked at the source code to mozilla... maybe i'm mistaken, but as far as i could tell it was mostly netscape stuff. in fact, wasn't gecko large done while netscape was still around?
I see your point. In the case of a commercial app I'm sure nobody would decide based on the toolkit used.
Sorry, you're absolutely right if the software in question has an RPM package. I was thinking of the still very typical configure, make, make install deal that hoses your file system with softwaren in a decidely entropic way.
Lots of people. Regardless, most people have a niche, and I'm saying I'd be really surprised if free software was usually the best option for that niche. If all you're talking about is soccer moms writing e-mails and surfing for recipes, then why the heck are we even bothering to have this conversation? We might as well freeze all software development.
Even if GIMP developers dedicated the next five years to replicating photoshop down to the smallest detail you would still be here whining about how it was two miliseconds slower or that the toolbar icon was two pixels offset to the right.
You're really taking liberties with my position. There is often nothing subtle about the difference in quality between an OSS and its commerical counterpart. Do you think the people that choose to pay for Excel are stupid, or do you think perhaps they know something you don't about the wisdom of sweating a few hundred dollars when dealing with the productivity of an employee costing a hundred thousand? If you save five minutes a day due to faster calculations, Excel pays for itself.
Don't take this the wrong way but I don't think there is anything any open source developer can do to make you and people like you happy. Why even try?
I hope they do it because it's fun. Otherwise, yeah, it's a pretty stupid enterprise. Having all software development duplicated is wasteful, and software costs really aren't dominating expenses for a company. Plus, there's no such thing as free as in beer software. You can give away software, but it wasn't free. At the very least it costs in lost productivity of programming talent that could be more efficiently allocated. Does it help society to have TWO parallel developments of MS Word, just so that a company can save %0.1 of it's budget? None of this makes sense to me except that it's fun to write software. As an economic argument, it's a total loser. If the entire OSS movement is based solely on stinginess then it's a collosal waste of time. Costs always find a way to make themselves known, so OSS is only justified if it results in better products. So far, I think the jury is out on that.
I agree, but then you're still tied to the Windows world and therefore must care about it. If you use a windows partition or CrossOver, it's all the same with regard to my original point, I think.
You have access to programs like Illustrator or Photoshop. Especially the former, because I can't think of any free vector drawing tool that comes within a mile of Illustrator for producing high quality graphics. Even if all you want to do is show some plots, you'll get better output from commercial tools like Igor or SigmaPlot. In my opinion, OSS has been very weak in terms of graphics. My guess is that since OSS is controlled largely by what geeks want to play with, and not what the market needs, you end up with stuff that only goes so far. I think to get something like illustrator you have to do a shitload of boring as hell work. It's not all gimicks and filter effects. And you need to do research. OSS projects just don't have the discipline or resources to compete with someone like Adobe.