Anyway, what I'm suggesting is that we stop prescribing reasons why one is better and the other isn't, based on what "many others" like, and actually give the people who use the machine an opportunity to decide for themselves.
I couldn't agree more - personally I couldn't give a flying fuck what OS people use and have no idea why so many people get so excited about comparison.
Even if 95% of them choose to scrap Windows (we can only hope!), it'll be worth it to show MS how unwanted Windows is in fresh markets.
Assuming the individual has a choice - most likely the institution in which the device is used will set policy. All it would take (in many circumstances) is a contribution from MS to sway that.
As for my second point, I'm asking this: if, given the choice between an unheard of product and a name as famous as Microsoft - knowing that nearly everyone (even those who prefer Linux) use regularly, which is the better proposition for your emerging workforce to be familiar with?
Of course you are perfectly correct but the PC seems now to be getting like cars - sure you could buy a smart car if all you do is scoot around town but the fact is that some people just can't bring themseleves to drive a small car. Some people buy four by fours because they think that even though they haven't ever gone off road, they may some day want to - some people buy a PC with the same mentality.
The other point is that these machines are competing with shops like PC World and Tescos who seem to offer a lot more for only £100 more - like a monitor.
This is beginning to piss me off as well - this is the second article I've looked at today where I've lost the will to finish because of the way it's laid out.
It's almost as irritating as those posts that link to a blog entry that links to the actual article.
OLPC was designed to run a customised Linux not Windows, which even in a somehow cut back version is, as we all know, very resource hungry. This is hardly a level playing field for Windows is it?
As you state Windows is pretty much a global standard, so what is the likelihood, given the choice, that developing nations are going to choose a platform that is not the same as that which everyone else uses.
As for your assertion that you needn't have access to source code to learn, that may be the case for you and in fact many others but it is not the case for a very large number of people who learn kinesthetically. Access to source code and being able to hack is how many, many people learn - especially when formal education is out of the question.
They wouldn't be competing on even terms at all though - one platform would give the ability to learn and develop and the other would be locked to closed source proprietry software (for the most part).
I don't think that better fuel economy is neccesarily a given - cars currently support a very minimal set of electrics and on many cars there is no surplus of power - a lot of small european cars for example noticeably dim lights when electric windows are engaged.
There also comes the issue of redundancy which is not currently an issue, as well as the increased weight if the control components and sensors.
And it's not just the ease of control but the margin of error. At altitude, a ten feet height error is relatively inconsequential even in crowded airspace - ten feet is likely endex for a car.
The other thing is navigation - automatic systems need to know where they are going not to mention detection of variations from that route, with a much finer margin of error.
I just re-read my post and I phrased it badly, I don't mean computers taking control but computers having control from the outset, whilst humans lack the reaction time to effectively take over from a system when it fails.
In other words - if I fall asleep at the wheel and the computer takes over that's cool but given the speed of a computer systems operation then how do I take over when it fails?
On the above system we had to add a comparative model to prevent actuator runaway for example.
See now this does interest me, ignoring economies of scale and the cost of components dropping in time - how on earth can a self driving car be of benefit in comparison to say adoption within mass transportation systems? Where with repetitive routes I can see where there is a benefit in driverless vehicles.
Also, seeing as you know more about this than I do - what level of automation are we talking about and how is it controlled - I have seen the automated vehicles used in ports with ISO container loading and they seem pretty impressive even if capped at 25 MPH. How do you forsee the user interacting with the system?
This interests me but purely from a technological and safety point of view. I work in aviation, most aircraft have some form of "autopilot" even if it just automatic stabilisation.
One of the rotary wing aircraft I work on had an analogue system (around 30 years old) that was capable of applying one third of the control required to correct in the time it took a human pilot to notice a percievable change in attitude.
A growing trend now is to assume that the computer is less likely to make a mistake than a human, ergo let the computer take control. To the point - how is the driver supposed to react in the event of a system failure? If the system can detect a change far quicker then it can take over quickly enough to prevent a problem but a human cannot.
What the do you mean "they're doing something right"?
Are they bollocks - it's dearer than a CD, with a poor selection and inconveniant to obtain - they are wither testing the waters or most likely trying to put themselves in a position to say they have empirical evidence that no-one wants DRM free music.
You are right about when they get it right, but they have done nothing here to be praised for.
Consensus seems to be that 6 months from now SonyBMG will issue an "I Told You So" press release claiming they went all out to allow DRM-free downloads and nobody wanted it.
There are quite a lot of people saying this and it may well be true but it makes no difference, it's the buying public they are now trying to shoehorn into something they don't want not just a bunch of people trying to justify peer-to-peer but their actual buying customers that they are now alienating.
Take my wife (please) - would never dream of pirating anything and is completely technophobic. Yet when she cannot put the CD she just bought onto her MP3 player, she sees no reason for me not to get it from a torrent site. She has even started saying some things we've said for years, only last night we watched a DVD and when that irritating "you wouldn't steal a handbag or a car so why steal a DVD" unskippable advert comes up she points out the obvious - why is that on a DVD I bought?
Point is, I think that everyone is starting to get pissed off with being treated as a criminal.
I've lived in the real world long enough to know exactly what I said - that the world isn't made of finites and divided into black and white. There is absolutely no reason why there cannot be middle ground between charity and business, as is shown by the other OLPC board members.
That's a very depressing way of looking at things, you neither need nor have too act like an asshole in order to make money surely? I'm sure there must some middle ground in any case.
There is a Mythbusters episode that investigates this. They called it a bust. The paint did burn readily but it was nothing compared to tthe hydrogen exploding.
When you say seperate systems for control, are you talking about three seperate redundant systems or multiple bused systems - there is a big difference in this context, if it's multiple bused systems then they have to share a common bus in order to know when to take over in the event of a failure.
Redundant systems can work from something as reliable as magnetic switching in the event of say an alternator failure.
That's true to a degree, but the aviation industry is not like any other - right from day one of training , integrity is drummed into you. The vast majority of engineers I work with, myself included would never shut up about something we perceived as dangerous.
Fortunately the law and the huge number of regulations, combined with anonymous reporting systems make it difficult to keep this sort of thing quiet.
Of course I'm not saying it doesn't happen - just that it's not as easy as in other industries, especially given the industries proclivity for managers ahving been technicians.
I see what you mean, but that's not always enough. Many years ago we experienced problems with the Bell 212's picking up external radio signals through the looms because of the way everything is interconnected.
It could be something fairly innocuous like sharing the same power source.
Inevitably - most aircraft utilise the same power supplies connected to at least two power bars - one for essential systems and one for non-essential, in the event of a loss in power the second bus bar is dropped offline.
Unless Boeing is doing something significantly different to everyone else, packet switching is unlikely in the avionics anyway. Avionics are no where near the power hungry systems used for internet access, Boeing's military aircraft are running in sub 10MHz clock speeds.
Like I said somewhere else here, I think the scenario is that the passenger systems could potentially swamp one of the bus controllers, however unless they have changed designs again then different vital systems are on different buses. Losing navigation is bad news, but losing instruments as well is possibly endex.
My thought is that some asshole at boeing decided to save some money on cable runs
While I completely agree, designers are always under pressure to reduce the amount of wiring looms - they add a surptising amount of weight thereby decreasing fuel economy.
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I couldn't agree more - personally I couldn't give a flying fuck what OS people use and have no idea why so many people get so excited about comparison.
Assuming the individual has a choice - most likely the institution in which the device is used will set policy. All it would take (in many circumstances) is a contribution from MS to sway that.
As for my second point, I'm asking this: if, given the choice between an unheard of product and a name as famous as Microsoft - knowing that nearly everyone (even those who prefer Linux) use regularly, which is the better proposition for your emerging workforce to be familiar with?
And I have one word for you: tangent.
Of course you are perfectly correct but the PC seems now to be getting like cars - sure you could buy a smart car if all you do is scoot around town but the fact is that some people just can't bring themseleves to drive a small car. Some people buy four by fours because they think that even though they haven't ever gone off road, they may some day want to - some people buy a PC with the same mentality.
The other point is that these machines are competing with shops like PC World and Tescos who seem to offer a lot more for only £100 more - like a monitor.
This is beginning to piss me off as well - this is the second article I've looked at today where I've lost the will to finish because of the way it's laid out.
It's almost as irritating as those posts that link to a blog entry that links to the actual article.
I don't agree - for two reasons:
As for your assertion that you needn't have access to source code to learn, that may be the case for you and in fact many others but it is not the case for a very large number of people who learn kinesthetically. Access to source code and being able to hack is how many, many people learn - especially when formal education is out of the question.
They wouldn't be competing on even terms at all though - one platform would give the ability to learn and develop and the other would be locked to closed source proprietry software (for the most part).
I don't think that better fuel economy is neccesarily a given - cars currently support a very minimal set of electrics and on many cars there is no surplus of power - a lot of small european cars for example noticeably dim lights when electric windows are engaged.
There also comes the issue of redundancy which is not currently an issue, as well as the increased weight if the control components and sensors.
And it's not just the ease of control but the margin of error. At altitude, a ten feet height error is relatively inconsequential even in crowded airspace - ten feet is likely endex for a car.
The other thing is navigation - automatic systems need to know where they are going not to mention detection of variations from that route, with a much finer margin of error.
I just re-read my post and I phrased it badly, I don't mean computers taking control but computers having control from the outset, whilst humans lack the reaction time to effectively take over from a system when it fails.
In other words - if I fall asleep at the wheel and the computer takes over that's cool but given the speed of a computer systems operation then how do I take over when it fails?
On the above system we had to add a comparative model to prevent actuator runaway for example.
See now this does interest me, ignoring economies of scale and the cost of components dropping in time - how on earth can a self driving car be of benefit in comparison to say adoption within mass transportation systems? Where with repetitive routes I can see where there is a benefit in driverless vehicles.
Also, seeing as you know more about this than I do - what level of automation are we talking about and how is it controlled - I have seen the automated vehicles used in ports with ISO container loading and they seem pretty impressive even if capped at 25 MPH. How do you forsee the user interacting with the system?
This interests me but purely from a technological and safety point of view. I work in aviation, most aircraft have some form of "autopilot" even if it just automatic stabilisation.
One of the rotary wing aircraft I work on had an analogue system (around 30 years old) that was capable of applying one third of the control required to correct in the time it took a human pilot to notice a percievable change in attitude.
A growing trend now is to assume that the computer is less likely to make a mistake than a human, ergo let the computer take control. To the point - how is the driver supposed to react in the event of a system failure? If the system can detect a change far quicker then it can take over quickly enough to prevent a problem but a human cannot.
Apparently there'll be a copy of Duke Nukem Forever in the glove box.
Or everyone who reads this article trying it out with a few choice names?
Same with http://cocksmokingmoneyhungryunderhandednetworksolutionassholes.com/ - fun isn't it.
What the do you mean "they're doing something right"?
Are they bollocks - it's dearer than a CD, with a poor selection and inconveniant to obtain - they are wither testing the waters or most likely trying to put themselves in a position to say they have empirical evidence that no-one wants DRM free music.
You are right about when they get it right, but they have done nothing here to be praised for.
There are quite a lot of people saying this and it may well be true but it makes no difference, it's the buying public they are now trying to shoehorn into something they don't want not just a bunch of people trying to justify peer-to-peer but their actual buying customers that they are now alienating.
Take my wife (please) - would never dream of pirating anything and is completely technophobic. Yet when she cannot put the CD she just bought onto her MP3 player, she sees no reason for me not to get it from a torrent site. She has even started saying some things we've said for years, only last night we watched a DVD and when that irritating "you wouldn't steal a handbag or a car so why steal a DVD" unskippable advert comes up she points out the obvious - why is that on a DVD I bought?
Point is, I think that everyone is starting to get pissed off with being treated as a criminal.
On the other hand, 80,000 users will not be online at the same time all the time - so there may be room for more but I see what you mean.
I've lived in the real world long enough to know exactly what I said - that the world isn't made of finites and divided into black and white. There is absolutely no reason why there cannot be middle ground between charity and business, as is shown by the other OLPC board members.
That's a very depressing way of looking at things, you neither need nor have too act like an asshole in order to make money surely? I'm sure there must some middle ground in any case.
There is a Mythbusters episode that investigates this. They called it a bust. The paint did burn readily but it was nothing compared to tthe hydrogen exploding.
Article, episode itself.
When you say seperate systems for control, are you talking about three seperate redundant systems or multiple bused systems - there is a big difference in this context, if it's multiple bused systems then they have to share a common bus in order to know when to take over in the event of a failure.
Redundant systems can work from something as reliable as magnetic switching in the event of say an alternator failure.
That's true to a degree, but the aviation industry is not like any other - right from day one of training , integrity is drummed into you. The vast majority of engineers I work with, myself included would never shut up about something we perceived as dangerous.
Fortunately the law and the huge number of regulations, combined with anonymous reporting systems make it difficult to keep this sort of thing quiet.
Of course I'm not saying it doesn't happen - just that it's not as easy as in other industries, especially given the industries proclivity for managers ahving been technicians.
I see what you mean, but that's not always enough. Many years ago we experienced problems with the Bell 212's picking up external radio signals through the looms because of the way everything is interconnected.
Inevitably - most aircraft utilise the same power supplies connected to at least two power bars - one for essential systems and one for non-essential, in the event of a loss in power the second bus bar is dropped offline.
Unless Boeing is doing something significantly different to everyone else, packet switching is unlikely in the avionics anyway. Avionics are no where near the power hungry systems used for internet access, Boeing's military aircraft are running in sub 10MHz clock speeds.
Like I said somewhere else here, I think the scenario is that the passenger systems could potentially swamp one of the bus controllers, however unless they have changed designs again then different vital systems are on different buses. Losing navigation is bad news, but losing instruments as well is possibly endex.
While I completely agree, designers are always under pressure to reduce the amount of wiring looms - they add a surptising amount of weight thereby decreasing fuel economy.