It sounds like bullshit, but it actually works. The guys who made this aren't schmucks, but experienced designers. I know 2 people who bought one and they both confirmed slightly lower latency in games. Look at it this way, a 500 dollar pair of running shoes really isn't going to help the average person much compared to a 50 dollar pair. However, a professional runner is going to benefit. This card is designed for the professional gamer (oddly enough, they do exist today).
Basically, by rooting for this thing to fail is basically saying you hate children. If you honestly think you can do better, THEN DO IT. This is the only effort on this scale ever attempted to use computers to educate globally. They'd rather kids either not have computers at all or have a full fledged computer that the TCO would be 10,000 dollars (by his metrics). Jesus christ people, if the thing is really as bad as people keep claiming it is, it will fall on its face immediately no thanks to you. You shouldn't want it to fail. However, it seems to be doing pretty well so far. They've got a lot of support from some really smart people. It seems uneducated armchair quarterbacks and competing companies have the biggest beef. Very few people whom complain actually have the goal OLPC does: To make the world a better place.
It's almost as if the RIAA let her off easier if she promised she'd bring a class action suit to various P2P companies. This sort of thing has got to make the RIAA spooge on themselves and I can not imagine someone actually taking their frustration out on Kazaa without some coaching. Nice move RIAA, but I see right through it!
How different is it than MSFT placing its products (Internet Explorer) in a premium marketing position (embedded in the OS)?'"
Simple. Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, google is not. Next there will be complaining that Linux distro's bundle media player software. You play by a different set of rules when you are a convicted monopoly.
You'd think it would be locked down. But tell that to my windows mobile based phone that got a virus and started randomly calling people in my contacts list!
The Atmel AVR butterfly is an insanely cheap development platform (20 dollars). It comes with more things than you can shake your fist at. They are also extremely popular and sell out quick so good luck finding one!
Speaking of... what do they mean by "AVR support"? They are true microcontrollers with very low clock speeds and very low amounts of storage and memory. Do they mean linux can now run natively on an ATMEGA in the same manner it runs on say a gumstix?! SWEET!!!!
I've never understood this hate of RFID on slashdot. We've used RFID in our organization where once we had to manually scan individual items. We save A LOT of time, it's just as accurate, and the system was fairly inexpensive to implement. We're not talking about putting these things in people here... we're talking about solving real world issues with a technology that was designed for that purpose.
The razor has many known issues and is just an anecdotal story. I have many electronics purchased for the past few years that have no issues and will probably still work in 20 years. The original NES was from the same time period and those had all kinds of problems. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with the time period so much as 1) The disposability of the product 2) Quality of the workers themselves 3) Maturity of the technology. I wouldn't exactly expect a cheap phone to last as long as a multi thousand dollar PC anyway (poor quality of the razors aside). One you throw in the same pocket as your keys, drop, throw, will get wet, sand, dust, heat, cold, etc, etc. I remember older TV's had wood cabinets (we all had one). They lasted a long time, but were expensive as hell. Have you seen how cheap you can get a TV today? One that may actually even last _longer_. This whole argument is complete bullshit and today's electronics are as durable as ever. You just have to do even comparisons and not compare a cheap phone with a multi thousand dollar computer.
Regardless, I have no problem with cheap technology that will only last me a couple years if the sum total of purchases is equal or less than one that will last me 10 years. It's like the people who purchase a 5,000 dollar computer thinking it will last them 5 years. I've never paid more than 1,000 dollars for a computer. Say I get a new computer each year for 5 years. By year 2 or 3 my computer will be faster than the 5,000 dollar computer. By year 5 the 5,000 dollar computer will be so painfully out of date no one will want to use it and it probably won't run any modern software. On top of it, I'll probably have at least 1-2 additional working computers family can use.
I think you hit on a REALLY good point in there. In my *nix administration, I have no daily activities! I've written programs for them all. This is almost impossible to do for most GUI's in general and more so with windows. I've always found the task scheduler to be a very weak replacement for cron and windows event log to be a weak replacement for syslog. The funny thing is... I do actually have a report I have to run manually once a week, and it's for the single windows box I maintain.
However, isn't this just a big mirror for Microsoft? The irony is so delicious I could eat it with a fork. What is the difference between this and some of the retarded ass patents Microsoft has taken out? They are equally absurd. What's the difference between patenting machine language and human language? At what point does something become patentable? Can you patent a programming language? A book? A sentence? A word? A letter? A pronunciation? Punctuation? Could I patent Klingon? I really don't see the difference between this and all the other silly patents/copyrights/IP out there. They are all equally as silly. MS can't really say shit to a guy.
I know a lot of people cite cost as a reason to use open source, but in my eyes that's never been the real advantage. Maybe that's an advantage for home users, but large organizations have lots and lots of money to burn and if it's not being spent on software it will be spent somewhere else. Open source has to do with control. I hate hate hate having to put in a feature request for software. It takes forever for it to make it into subsequent iterations or if you pay for them to customize it, there is no guarantee the feature will be incorporated into future versions and you may have to pay them again to integrate it into a new version again. With open source, if there is something we need, we do it ourselves. Same thing goes for open formats. With a closed format you are basically renting storage space for your data and are at their mercy. You never really own your data. You have no way to get to it except through their interface. With open standards, if it ever came down to it, you could write an interface yourself to read your data.
I've been through 4 hurricanes in 3 years. Every time, we lose power and street lights are down. The very first hurricane people were very cautious. They drove at reasonable speeds, were courteous to pedestrians, and drove in a generally safe manner. That lasted about 24 hours. Since the streets were pretty clear of other drivers, there was a lot more racing going on. People were extremely selfish at intersections and would never let people from the low traffic roads through. Those driving more cautiously were honked at and the road rage came out even more. Basically, every dickhead on the road was twice as aggressive, and every cautious driver was twice as timid.
It may be a good idea to have a reduction in superfluous signs, but getting rid of all traffic laws is stupid. It will work for a very short while, until people are used to driving that way. Then after a few months or years, things will be the same (or worse) than before.
This is so true! Many places in the US for example are in need of many many things. However, they still have parks and camps and programs to beautify the city. If all you did was ever focus on the immediate dire needs (and there always is plenty to focus on) you'd never move forward on a higher level.
Education is one of those things. Educated people can solve their own problems. Constantly throwing money and solving their problems for them temporarily doesn't help anything. These places need to move to a higher level. People keep forgetting the $100 laptop is less about computer ownership and more about a device that can hold massive amounts of education material.
And I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, because it's been said a million times before... This thing isn't really meant for people who are living in a tent and this is their only source of light. It's meant for countries who've moved past that stage. No one expects someone dying of starvation to have one. However, someone in a country where the knowledge of purifying water could mean life or death, even if they have a belly full of food.
I think the wii is going to be badass and I'm personally going to buy one. However, I think the wii will be fighting for the 2nd spot on the big three totem pole and not 1st. I just don't know enough hard core gamers that are excited about the wii. I've noticed that many of the hardcore gamers I know are satisfied with the idea of a system that offers nothing more than better graphics than the old system. The wii is radically different. I don't think they really even want to have to raise their arms to use the wiimote. I love nintendo and I think the wii will be badass, but I just don't see them capturing the hardcore audience.
The best they can hope for is getting the general public that normally don't play video games to play the wii. Most people find xbox and playstation controllers confusing and cumbersome. Maybe the wiimote will deliver a more natural style of play with a lower learning curve, hence a lower barrier to playing games. However, hardcore gamers (and even moderate gamers) are pretty used to xbox and playstation style controllers and will probably find it harder to get used to the wii controller. I don't think they will get much of the hardcore and moderate gamer market. Maybe they can become the ipod of the video game world this generation?
Sorta... XML came at a time when there weren't a whole lot of good viable data representation standards. Those that did (i.e. SGML) were too complicated for light use. XML was meant to be used by the masses while still technically remain an SGML subset. We have better alternatives today, but once something is in widespread use, it's not going away for awhile.
That's about right. I always see these news stories about the digital generation and generation myspace, etc, etc. They'll show some kid downloading music, chatting on AIM, going on myspace, and playing some game in flash on a website. The parents go on how great he can multitask and how great he is on the computer, blah, blah, blah.
The truth is, many kids just find a few things they really like and latch onto them. They don't really understand any sort of computing fundamentals. They understand how to go on AIM and myspace all day. When faced with a computer intensive task that relies on critical thinking and not just keystroke habits, they fall flat on their face.
It's funny that almost all on the list (plus other lamers off the top of my head) were in the 90's. I was huge into gaming in the 90's and I remember these systems. They all looked promising at release, however there was always some huge problem that loomed keeping them from ever having a chance. A biggie was price (Jaguar, CDI, 3D0). Another was games (32x, Saturn). I think if you are lacking in either of those categories your system is never going to have a chance.
Neo-Geo had badass arcade style games that I still play to this day. Out of all the insanely priced systems, I think that was one of the few that had good enough games it survived many years despite the price.
Ok.... now time for reality. Red Hat 7.2, the last releases of NCR Unix, old versions of SCO Unix, old versions of Sun OS, United Linux 1.0. You know how much work it would be to get Ruby on these machines? You know what the reaction would be if I brought Ruby programs to the admins of these machines? They would look at me like a moron. And I would be a moron for assuming they'd be able to quickly and easily install Ruby on an 8 year old OS.
Re:Ruby!
on
The Ruby Way
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok I know no one is actually going to discuss the book and just discuss Ruby so I'll partake!
I'm going to come out and say it. Ruby is a badass language. Forget Rails. Ruby isn't Rails. Ruby was badass way before Rails ever became popular. It's nice to see a usable, clean language that truly is 100% object oriented. So many other languages claim to be object oriented but are actually a hybrid language (Java, Python, C#). The fact that Ruby's creator had enough insight to weave regular expressions right into the language (via ~ operator) is very important. It's annoying to compile regular expressions and have to deal with raw strings and other gotchas. I like to match with =~ and have it return $1 $2 $3. Object oriented regular expressions still exist and actually ~ is just a shortcut. I also like the convention using exclamation marks for in place modification. So chomp returns the chomp'd argument while chomp! modifies in place. Other languages it can be a guessing game whether it's going to modify in place or not.
All in all Ruby is one of the most fantastic languages I have ever dealt with.
Now for the bad news... While the language design was magnificent, there are pragmatic issues that keep me from using it a lot. I'm going to compare it to Perl and Python because Ruby would be most attractive to that crowd. While the language itself is mature, it wasn't until a few years ago that Ruby was translated to English (the documentation anyway). So even though it's been around awhile, it's only picked up steam recently. This means the actual implementation of Ruby isn't nearly as mature. It's much slower than Python and much much slower than Perl. There are serious projects in place to solve this issue, but as it stands today it's somewhat slow. Also, (and this is the biggest reason) there just aren't a whole lot of supporting libraries out there (compared to Python and Perl anyway). Since it is somewhat new in popularity you can't really assume it's easy to get. So code that has to run on a lot of machines (usually Unix and Linux flavors), it may be a lot of work for them to install it. We have some older Linux and Unix installs, and most have Python and they all have Perl. None have Ruby and very few have a native package available.
But there is hope! All the above mentioned problems are just due to Ruby's youngness. Python was in a very similar situation a few years ago. Ruby has a pretty good snowball it's building. It's immensely better than just 3 years ago, and I think 3 years from now it will have reached mature Python status.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like bullshit, but it actually works. The guys who made this aren't schmucks, but experienced designers. I know 2 people who bought one and they both confirmed slightly lower latency in games. Look at it this way, a 500 dollar pair of running shoes really isn't going to help the average person much compared to a 50 dollar pair. However, a professional runner is going to benefit. This card is designed for the professional gamer (oddly enough, they do exist today).
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
Basically, by rooting for this thing to fail is basically saying you hate children. If you honestly think you can do better, THEN DO IT. This is the only effort on this scale ever attempted to use computers to educate globally. They'd rather kids either not have computers at all or have a full fledged computer that the TCO would be 10,000 dollars (by his metrics). Jesus christ people, if the thing is really as bad as people keep claiming it is, it will fall on its face immediately no thanks to you. You shouldn't want it to fail. However, it seems to be doing pretty well so far. They've got a lot of support from some really smart people. It seems uneducated armchair quarterbacks and competing companies have the biggest beef. Very few people whom complain actually have the goal OLPC does: To make the world a better place.
It's almost as if the RIAA let her off easier if she promised she'd bring a class action suit to various P2P companies. This sort of thing has got to make the RIAA spooge on themselves and I can not imagine someone actually taking their frustration out on Kazaa without some coaching. Nice move RIAA, but I see right through it!
How different is it than MSFT placing its products (Internet Explorer) in a premium marketing position (embedded in the OS)?'"
Simple. Microsoft is a convicted monopoly, google is not. Next there will be complaining that Linux distro's bundle media player software. You play by a different set of rules when you are a convicted monopoly.
You'd think it would be locked down. But tell that to my windows mobile based phone that got a virus and started randomly calling people in my contacts list!
Nevermind... it supports the 32bit arch not the 8bit one. BIG difference.
The Atmel AVR butterfly is an insanely cheap development platform (20 dollars). It comes with more things than you can shake your fist at. They are also extremely popular and sell out quick so good luck finding one! Speaking of... what do they mean by "AVR support"? They are true microcontrollers with very low clock speeds and very low amounts of storage and memory. Do they mean linux can now run natively on an ATMEGA in the same manner it runs on say a gumstix?! SWEET!!!!
I've never understood this hate of RFID on slashdot. We've used RFID in our organization where once we had to manually scan individual items. We save A LOT of time, it's just as accurate, and the system was fairly inexpensive to implement. We're not talking about putting these things in people here... we're talking about solving real world issues with a technology that was designed for that purpose.
The razor has many known issues and is just an anecdotal story. I have many electronics purchased for the past few years that have no issues and will probably still work in 20 years. The original NES was from the same time period and those had all kinds of problems. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with the time period so much as 1) The disposability of the product 2) Quality of the workers themselves 3) Maturity of the technology. I wouldn't exactly expect a cheap phone to last as long as a multi thousand dollar PC anyway (poor quality of the razors aside). One you throw in the same pocket as your keys, drop, throw, will get wet, sand, dust, heat, cold, etc, etc. I remember older TV's had wood cabinets (we all had one). They lasted a long time, but were expensive as hell. Have you seen how cheap you can get a TV today? One that may actually even last _longer_. This whole argument is complete bullshit and today's electronics are as durable as ever. You just have to do even comparisons and not compare a cheap phone with a multi thousand dollar computer.
Regardless, I have no problem with cheap technology that will only last me a couple years if the sum total of purchases is equal or less than one that will last me 10 years. It's like the people who purchase a 5,000 dollar computer thinking it will last them 5 years. I've never paid more than 1,000 dollars for a computer. Say I get a new computer each year for 5 years. By year 2 or 3 my computer will be faster than the 5,000 dollar computer. By year 5 the 5,000 dollar computer will be so painfully out of date no one will want to use it and it probably won't run any modern software. On top of it, I'll probably have at least 1-2 additional working computers family can use.
I think you hit on a REALLY good point in there. In my *nix administration, I have no daily activities! I've written programs for them all. This is almost impossible to do for most GUI's in general and more so with windows. I've always found the task scheduler to be a very weak replacement for cron and windows event log to be a weak replacement for syslog. The funny thing is... I do actually have a report I have to run manually once a week, and it's for the single windows box I maintain.
First of all, I agree it's stupid...
However, isn't this just a big mirror for Microsoft? The irony is so delicious I could eat it with a fork. What is the difference between this and some of the retarded ass patents Microsoft has taken out? They are equally absurd. What's the difference between patenting machine language and human language? At what point does something become patentable? Can you patent a programming language? A book? A sentence? A word? A letter? A pronunciation? Punctuation? Could I patent Klingon? I really don't see the difference between this and all the other silly patents/copyrights/IP out there. They are all equally as silly. MS can't really say shit to a guy.
I know a lot of people cite cost as a reason to use open source, but in my eyes that's never been the real advantage. Maybe that's an advantage for home users, but large organizations have lots and lots of money to burn and if it's not being spent on software it will be spent somewhere else. Open source has to do with control. I hate hate hate having to put in a feature request for software. It takes forever for it to make it into subsequent iterations or if you pay for them to customize it, there is no guarantee the feature will be incorporated into future versions and you may have to pay them again to integrate it into a new version again. With open source, if there is something we need, we do it ourselves. Same thing goes for open formats. With a closed format you are basically renting storage space for your data and are at their mercy. You never really own your data. You have no way to get to it except through their interface. With open standards, if it ever came down to it, you could write an interface yourself to read your data.
Sorry, the subject just fit with yours
I've been through 4 hurricanes in 3 years. Every time, we lose power and street lights are down. The very first hurricane people were very cautious. They drove at reasonable speeds, were courteous to pedestrians, and drove in a generally safe manner. That lasted about 24 hours. Since the streets were pretty clear of other drivers, there was a lot more racing going on. People were extremely selfish at intersections and would never let people from the low traffic roads through. Those driving more cautiously were honked at and the road rage came out even more. Basically, every dickhead on the road was twice as aggressive, and every cautious driver was twice as timid.
It may be a good idea to have a reduction in superfluous signs, but getting rid of all traffic laws is stupid. It will work for a very short while, until people are used to driving that way. Then after a few months or years, things will be the same (or worse) than before.
This is so true! Many places in the US for example are in need of many many things. However, they still have parks and camps and programs to beautify the city. If all you did was ever focus on the immediate dire needs (and there always is plenty to focus on) you'd never move forward on a higher level.
Education is one of those things. Educated people can solve their own problems. Constantly throwing money and solving their problems for them temporarily doesn't help anything. These places need to move to a higher level. People keep forgetting the $100 laptop is less about computer ownership and more about a device that can hold massive amounts of education material.
And I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, because it's been said a million times before... This thing isn't really meant for people who are living in a tent and this is their only source of light. It's meant for countries who've moved past that stage. No one expects someone dying of starvation to have one. However, someone in a country where the knowledge of purifying water could mean life or death, even if they have a belly full of food.
I think the wii is going to be badass and I'm personally going to buy one. However, I think the wii will be fighting for the 2nd spot on the big three totem pole and not 1st. I just don't know enough hard core gamers that are excited about the wii. I've noticed that many of the hardcore gamers I know are satisfied with the idea of a system that offers nothing more than better graphics than the old system. The wii is radically different. I don't think they really even want to have to raise their arms to use the wiimote. I love nintendo and I think the wii will be badass, but I just don't see them capturing the hardcore audience.
The best they can hope for is getting the general public that normally don't play video games to play the wii. Most people find xbox and playstation controllers confusing and cumbersome. Maybe the wiimote will deliver a more natural style of play with a lower learning curve, hence a lower barrier to playing games. However, hardcore gamers (and even moderate gamers) are pretty used to xbox and playstation style controllers and will probably find it harder to get used to the wii controller. I don't think they will get much of the hardcore and moderate gamer market. Maybe they can become the ipod of the video game world this generation?
Sorta... XML came at a time when there weren't a whole lot of good viable data representation standards. Those that did (i.e. SGML) were too complicated for light use. XML was meant to be used by the masses while still technically remain an SGML subset. We have better alternatives today, but once something is in widespread use, it's not going away for awhile.
That's about right. I always see these news stories about the digital generation and generation myspace, etc, etc. They'll show some kid downloading music, chatting on AIM, going on myspace, and playing some game in flash on a website. The parents go on how great he can multitask and how great he is on the computer, blah, blah, blah.
The truth is, many kids just find a few things they really like and latch onto them. They don't really understand any sort of computing fundamentals. They understand how to go on AIM and myspace all day. When faced with a computer intensive task that relies on critical thinking and not just keystroke habits, they fall flat on their face.
It's funny that almost all on the list (plus other lamers off the top of my head) were in the 90's. I was huge into gaming in the 90's and I remember these systems. They all looked promising at release, however there was always some huge problem that loomed keeping them from ever having a chance. A biggie was price (Jaguar, CDI, 3D0). Another was games (32x, Saturn). I think if you are lacking in either of those categories your system is never going to have a chance.
Neo-Geo had badass arcade style games that I still play to this day. Out of all the insanely priced systems, I think that was one of the few that had good enough games it survived many years despite the price.
Because Sony isn't Willie Wonka and the PS3 isn't a chocolate factory.
Ok.... now time for reality. Red Hat 7.2, the last releases of NCR Unix, old versions of SCO Unix, old versions of Sun OS, United Linux 1.0. You know how much work it would be to get Ruby on these machines? You know what the reaction would be if I brought Ruby programs to the admins of these machines? They would look at me like a moron. And I would be a moron for assuming they'd be able to quickly and easily install Ruby on an 8 year old OS.
Ok I know no one is actually going to discuss the book and just discuss Ruby so I'll partake!
I'm going to come out and say it. Ruby is a badass language. Forget Rails. Ruby isn't Rails. Ruby was badass way before Rails ever became popular. It's nice to see a usable, clean language that truly is 100% object oriented. So many other languages claim to be object oriented but are actually a hybrid language (Java, Python, C#). The fact that Ruby's creator had enough insight to weave regular expressions right into the language (via ~ operator) is very important. It's annoying to compile regular expressions and have to deal with raw strings and other gotchas. I like to match with =~ and have it return $1 $2 $3. Object oriented regular expressions still exist and actually ~ is just a shortcut. I also like the convention using exclamation marks for in place modification. So chomp returns the chomp'd argument while chomp! modifies in place. Other languages it can be a guessing game whether it's going to modify in place or not.
All in all Ruby is one of the most fantastic languages I have ever dealt with.
Now for the bad news... While the language design was magnificent, there are pragmatic issues that keep me from using it a lot. I'm going to compare it to Perl and Python because Ruby would be most attractive to that crowd. While the language itself is mature, it wasn't until a few years ago that Ruby was translated to English (the documentation anyway). So even though it's been around awhile, it's only picked up steam recently. This means the actual implementation of Ruby isn't nearly as mature. It's much slower than Python and much much slower than Perl. There are serious projects in place to solve this issue, but as it stands today it's somewhat slow. Also, (and this is the biggest reason) there just aren't a whole lot of supporting libraries out there (compared to Python and Perl anyway). Since it is somewhat new in popularity you can't really assume it's easy to get. So code that has to run on a lot of machines (usually Unix and Linux flavors), it may be a lot of work for them to install it. We have some older Linux and Unix installs, and most have Python and they all have Perl. None have Ruby and very few have a native package available.
But there is hope! All the above mentioned problems are just due to Ruby's youngness. Python was in a very similar situation a few years ago. Ruby has a pretty good snowball it's building. It's immensely better than just 3 years ago, and I think 3 years from now it will have reached mature Python status.
It was a trap.
I'm so confused. Why would a protocol sue anyone?