We may have made a big difference in the last century, but remember we took a few billion years to turn up and reach that century. While intelligent life could make great changes in two decades to that planet, the chances that it's been going on in the last two decades (or will in the next two) are vanishingly small, even if we assume that life is there.
But to get people using it, there has to be an easy way to get an account on a public server for free. Because ordinary users don't want to rent their own server. Think GMail for e-mail, or Wordpress.com for wordpress blogs.
Plus, of course, it makes it that much more complicated to write software, and to find solutions when things go wrong (one of the best things about Ubuntu is that it has enough critical mass that you can search for "ubuntu ", rather than "linux ".)
It's "good enough" for what's out there at the moment. Improving performance means browsers will be "good enough" to let developers do things that would crawl in current browsers.
And what makes you think the other things are ignored? FF4 is changing the interface (ergonomy). Out of process plugins came in with 3.6 (reliability). I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'compatibility', but HTML5 specifies parsing, which should make pages less likely to change from browser to browser, and FF4's new parser will follow that.
Well, many of the millions of people who have built up networks of contacts there might be a bit upset. But hey, what's that against your suffering from knowing that they exist, even if no-one forces you to use them?
Really, chill out. You don't like social websites. Fine. That doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.
Of course, there's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the web that you can use to find interesting content among huge amounts of dross. No sir. The only way to look for content is by random trial and error.
Seriously, no-one's forcing you to watch Youtube videos. At least, I assume not. If they are it's probably cruel and unusual punishment.
Exactly. This is why Wikipedia is getting keen on citations and reliable sources. It can't be authoritative itself, but it can point you at sources that are.
Before you teach someone to drive a car, how about some time taking it to pieces, then showing them how to reassemble it, with a detailed explanation of what each bit does. Then, once it's working again (and they really understand it) they can start actually learning to use it.
The basics of how something works are often not the best place to start learning about it. Those details are largely irrelevant to most people. Learning a high-level language means they can get things done, while learning to think in a logical fashion. For those that want to go into more detail, they can go 'under the hood' to see things like "memory addressing modes" later. Just like we don't expect people to learn the basics of a fuel injection system before starting a car.
I've got by fine with flash without either of those. Although I do use adblock, which I guess cuts down on the number of flash things I see (but doesn't cripple browsing experience). I've not really noticed problems even when browsing without adblock.
In principle, if someone had invested in building up intellectual property in the expectation that they could recoup the investment, retrospectively destroying their investment would be an injustice. I'm not saying that they should have been doing it in the first place, or that scaling back patent & copyrights is a bad idea. But the idea of "not changing the ground they're standing on" could still be valid.
I think, though, that as Linux becomes more popular on the desktop (which it seems to be, gradually), there'll be more apps to download, and users will get used to doing so. If we ever get the bulk of non-techie users, they'll be cheerfully installing stuff from anywhere. The repository model still helps, but it doesn't make Linux invincible.
We connect to a repository, which is run by software experts who have repackaged and tested the programs in question, the software gets downloaded automatically
Which is fine so long as you only want to install things from your distro's repositories. If you want to install something too specialist to have been included, or non-FOSS software, or even just try a new version of something, you'll be going outside that. Off the top of my head, for Ubuntu: Sage Math (no longer packaged, download binaries from website), Mendeley (binaries on website), Google Earth (Medibuntu), Google Chrome (.deb from Google's website), Thunderbird 3.1 (PPA).
I appreciate the value of repositories, and I know people do a lot of work testing and packaging things. But let's not pretend that all software we want will always be in the repositories. Especially as Linux becomes more popular, there's going to be more software that can be downloaded and installed. We shouldn't try to ignore or suppress that.
I recognise that could be a problem, but having several GB of mail is probably unusual. And people with that much mail are more likely to know how to disable downloading than people without are to turn it on.
But Thunderbird is trying to compete with advanced webmail interfaces like Gmail. Specifically, it's trying to maintain an advantage of local programs (easily working offline), and catch up with something Gmail does very well: rapid full text searching. To do that searching client side requires a local cache and an index.
Since drive space, CPU time and bandwidth are getting ever cheaper, they turned it on by default. My relatively cheap laptop has 250GB of storage, so a mail cache isn't going to hurt. Of course it takes some time to download and index it at first. But few people will ever change default settings, so if it had been off by default, one of the key advantages of the new version would be relegated to obscurity.
As usual, if you want to use an old computer, you have to forego the latest software, or tweak the settings for performance. Perhaps they should have enabled it only on computers powerful enough to support it. But I guess that checking is non-trivial for cross platform software.
1) It did get quite a bit more stable and responsive. IMHO they opened it up too early, and the early flaws put many people off.
2) I've never understood this point. It was nothing like e-mail! Yes, you could have a conversation, but the power was really in using it more like an easy, private wiki, e.g. for planning a day out with a group of friends. I think the developer talk ("what would e-mail be like if it was invented today?") was misleading.
3) I sort of agree that it was confusing. Specifically, they released it without any guidance on what to do with it. They did later try to remedy that with a few templates (e.g. "Brainstorm", "Task tracking"), but it was too late
Armchair pundit assessment: it was a good idea, but they made a hash of releasing it. They should have left it longer, released more polished code with more servers behind it (so that it didn't need invites), and given people an idea of how to use it. Oh, and they should have turned federation on (they still haven't). Hopefully we'll see it again in some form, especially the idea of federation.
What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru
So you mean that they should have pushed it into places which couldn't afford it, nor the infrastructure to support it, and refused it to the places that wanted it? Sending laptops to a tiny village in Somalia with no internet connection would be a waste of time. Selling cheap computers to what you call "mid-level" countries like those in South America could do some good.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, he's not offering them his help because he wants the attention, he's offering them help because he actually wants them to succeed? As the head of a non-profit organisation with a mission to promote cheap computers for education, is that so implausible? And despite the various issues OLPC has run into, it's probably got more experience than anyone else for this kind of project (Intel's classmate is technologically similar, but I think OLPC is much more interested in how they are used and supported).
For my final point, I'd like to borrow from family guy: "Oh yeah, I bet you've got a much better --low cost educational laptop--. Stupid dog."
Most users will use the computer for Facebook, Twitter, MSN messenger and such.
...most of the time. But for many users, there'll be that one piece of Windows-only software they need for work, or a cheap printer that doesn't 'just work' on Linux, or a 3G dongle without a Linux driver, or...you get the picture.
And when they discover that it doesn't work, they're going to complain to Dell. If Dell were to point them in the direction of the FOSS community, they would be sure to receive polite responses and immediate fixes. Or not. At best, they'd get a set of instructions, probably involving the command line, and at worst, they'd get flamed. I use Linux, and I have once installed it for a non-technical friend, but trying to push it to a widespread audience won't help the users, won't help Dell, and certainly won't help Linux.
Re:It's not the frontier, but the mass market
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
[snip]... where the vast bulk of the users are: using devices with screens at least the size of a sheet of paper and with input devices that are usable for the mass creation of content.
And when you can drop your phone into a cradle at home, and it magically hooks up to a screen, keyboard and mouse? Or maybe even a short-range wireless link?
It doesn't take a genius to predict that what we now call 'smartphones' will get cheaper and more mass market until what you call a "basic mobile" seems as quaint as a phone with a two-line, monochrome LCD screen and a sticky-out aerial does now. It's hardly even a prediction: I already see more and more smartphones around, and more advertising for them.
Listen to yourself. Technology is like it is, and it's not going to change? Only a few years ago, cameras in phones seemed like a gimmick; of course people would want separate digital cameras. Now only the cheapest phones come without one, and the quality on the better ones is as good as basic consumer cameras. Even the iPod nano now has a camera. Predicting technology is never easy, but predicting that it won't really change much is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
..."plan" a collision... if a web-site offered you a file and an MD5 hash to test the source of that file, with enough cleverness and computing power another party could give you a different file with the same MD5 hash.
Not quite. A collision attack generates two different inputs with the same MD5 hash. To compute a value with a given hash, you would need a preimage attack (or brute force).
In recent studies researchers have found that BT maize (corn) can cause serious health problems in mammals.
Government scientists also read these things. See what the Australian & NZ Food Standards agency said about it. To paraphrase: "Oh, those guys again. Still using the suspect statistics that were criticised the last time they used them. This isn't evidence for any harmful effect."
Please don't confuse some of the evil things Monsanto does with the safety of GM as a whole.
Only because of the completely inaccurate/. title. In fact, it's not Monsanto saying it:
Professor Jonathan Jones is senior scientist for The Sainsbury Laboratory, based at the John Innes Centre, a research centre in plant and microbial science
1.calling it man-made is complete speculation at the current point(yes it is, there's correlation at best, no proof of causality)
If you leave human influences out of the models, they diverge significantly from real measurements. If you put that influence in, the model results track real world results. This is in the IPCC report. Whether you call it "proof" is a bit philosophical, but it's definitely well beyond "complete speculation".
2.calling it warming is kind of fucked up since it's warming in some places, and cooling in others
Overall it is warming. Nonetheless, you're right that it's oversimplistic, and this is why we often now talk about "climate change" rather than "global warming".
Slashdot Mirror
We may have made a big difference in the last century, but remember we took a few billion years to turn up and reach that century. While intelligent life could make great changes in two decades to that planet, the chances that it's been going on in the last two decades (or will in the next two) are vanishingly small, even if we assume that life is there.
But to get people using it, there has to be an easy way to get an account on a public server for free. Because ordinary users don't want to rent their own server. Think GMail for e-mail, or Wordpress.com for wordpress blogs.
Plus, of course, it makes it that much more complicated to write software, and to find solutions when things go wrong (one of the best things about Ubuntu is that it has enough critical mass that you can search for "ubuntu ", rather than "linux ".)
It's "good enough" for what's out there at the moment. Improving performance means browsers will be "good enough" to let developers do things that would crawl in current browsers.
And what makes you think the other things are ignored? FF4 is changing the interface (ergonomy). Out of process plugins came in with 3.6 (reliability). I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'compatibility', but HTML5 specifies parsing, which should make pages less likely to change from browser to browser, and FF4's new parser will follow that.
Been done
Well, many of the millions of people who have built up networks of contacts there might be a bit upset. But hey, what's that against your suffering from knowing that they exist, even if no-one forces you to use them?
Really, chill out. You don't like social websites. Fine. That doesn't mean they shouldn't exist.
Of course, there's absolutely nothing whatsoever on the web that you can use to find interesting content among huge amounts of dross. No sir. The only way to look for content is by random trial and error.
Seriously, no-one's forcing you to watch Youtube videos. At least, I assume not. If they are it's probably cruel and unusual punishment.
Oh, sorry, is this your lawn I'm standing on?
Now if there was some easy way to disable the horrible, over-scripted image result page layout I'd be a happy camper!
Scroll to bottom of page (yes, I know, it's a long way). Click "Switch to basic version". You're welcome.
And am I the only one here who likes the new image search? More images on screen at a time, and much quicker to get extra images.
Exactly. This is why Wikipedia is getting keen on citations and reliable sources. It can't be authoritative itself, but it can point you at sources that are.
Personally I'm waiting for an automated lawn mower that doesn't suck!
You're doing it wrong. It's not a lawnmower, it's a vacuum cleaner.
Before you teach someone to drive a car, how about some time taking it to pieces, then showing them how to reassemble it, with a detailed explanation of what each bit does. Then, once it's working again (and they really understand it) they can start actually learning to use it.
The basics of how something works are often not the best place to start learning about it. Those details are largely irrelevant to most people. Learning a high-level language means they can get things done, while learning to think in a logical fashion. For those that want to go into more detail, they can go 'under the hood' to see things like "memory addressing modes" later. Just like we don't expect people to learn the basics of a fuel injection system before starting a car.
I've got by fine with flash without either of those. Although I do use adblock, which I guess cuts down on the number of flash things I see (but doesn't cripple browsing experience). I've not really noticed problems even when browsing without adblock.
In principle, if someone had invested in building up intellectual property in the expectation that they could recoup the investment, retrospectively destroying their investment would be an injustice. I'm not saying that they should have been doing it in the first place, or that scaling back patent & copyrights is a bad idea. But the idea of "not changing the ground they're standing on" could still be valid.
I think, though, that as Linux becomes more popular on the desktop (which it seems to be, gradually), there'll be more apps to download, and users will get used to doing so. If we ever get the bulk of non-techie users, they'll be cheerfully installing stuff from anywhere. The repository model still helps, but it doesn't make Linux invincible.
We connect to a repository, which is run by software experts who have repackaged and tested the programs in question, the software gets downloaded automatically
Which is fine so long as you only want to install things from your distro's repositories. If you want to install something too specialist to have been included, or non-FOSS software, or even just try a new version of something, you'll be going outside that. Off the top of my head, for Ubuntu: Sage Math (no longer packaged, download binaries from website), Mendeley (binaries on website), Google Earth (Medibuntu), Google Chrome (.deb from Google's website), Thunderbird 3.1 (PPA).
I appreciate the value of repositories, and I know people do a lot of work testing and packaging things. But let's not pretend that all software we want will always be in the repositories. Especially as Linux becomes more popular, there's going to be more software that can be downloaded and installed. We shouldn't try to ignore or suppress that.
I recognise that could be a problem, but having several GB of mail is probably unusual. And people with that much mail are more likely to know how to disable downloading than people without are to turn it on.
But Thunderbird is trying to compete with advanced webmail interfaces like Gmail. Specifically, it's trying to maintain an advantage of local programs (easily working offline), and catch up with something Gmail does very well: rapid full text searching. To do that searching client side requires a local cache and an index.
Since drive space, CPU time and bandwidth are getting ever cheaper, they turned it on by default. My relatively cheap laptop has 250GB of storage, so a mail cache isn't going to hurt. Of course it takes some time to download and index it at first. But few people will ever change default settings, so if it had been off by default, one of the key advantages of the new version would be relegated to obscurity.
As usual, if you want to use an old computer, you have to forego the latest software, or tweak the settings for performance. Perhaps they should have enabled it only on computers powerful enough to support it. But I guess that checking is non-trivial for cross platform software.
Armchair pundit assessment: it was a good idea, but they made a hash of releasing it. They should have left it longer, released more polished code with more servers behind it (so that it didn't need invites), and given people an idea of how to use it. Oh, and they should have turned federation on (they still haven't). Hopefully we'll see it again in some form, especially the idea of federation.
What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru
So you mean that they should have pushed it into places which couldn't afford it, nor the infrastructure to support it, and refused it to the places that wanted it? Sending laptops to a tiny village in Somalia with no internet connection would be a waste of time. Selling cheap computers to what you call "mid-level" countries like those in South America could do some good.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, he's not offering them his help because he wants the attention, he's offering them help because he actually wants them to succeed? As the head of a non-profit organisation with a mission to promote cheap computers for education, is that so implausible? And despite the various issues OLPC has run into, it's probably got more experience than anyone else for this kind of project (Intel's classmate is technologically similar, but I think OLPC is much more interested in how they are used and supported).
For my final point, I'd like to borrow from family guy: "Oh yeah, I bet you've got a much better --low cost educational laptop--. Stupid dog."
Most users will use the computer for Facebook, Twitter, MSN messenger and such.
...most of the time. But for many users, there'll be that one piece of Windows-only software they need for work, or a cheap printer that doesn't 'just work' on Linux, or a 3G dongle without a Linux driver, or...you get the picture.
And when they discover that it doesn't work, they're going to complain to Dell. If Dell were to point them in the direction of the FOSS community, they would be sure to receive polite responses and immediate fixes. Or not. At best, they'd get a set of instructions, probably involving the command line, and at worst, they'd get flamed. I use Linux, and I have once installed it for a non-technical friend, but trying to push it to a widespread audience won't help the users, won't help Dell, and certainly won't help Linux.
[snip]... where the vast bulk of the users are: using devices with screens at least the size of a sheet of paper and with input devices that are usable for the mass creation of content.
And when you can drop your phone into a cradle at home, and it magically hooks up to a screen, keyboard and mouse? Or maybe even a short-range wireless link?
It doesn't take a genius to predict that what we now call 'smartphones' will get cheaper and more mass market until what you call a "basic mobile" seems as quaint as a phone with a two-line, monochrome LCD screen and a sticky-out aerial does now. It's hardly even a prediction: I already see more and more smartphones around, and more advertising for them.
Listen to yourself. Technology is like it is, and it's not going to change? Only a few years ago, cameras in phones seemed like a gimmick; of course people would want separate digital cameras. Now only the cheapest phones come without one, and the quality on the better ones is as good as basic consumer cameras. Even the iPod nano now has a camera. Predicting technology is never easy, but predicting that it won't really change much is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
..."plan" a collision... if a web-site offered you a file and an MD5 hash to test the source of that file, with enough cleverness and computing power another party could give you a different file with the same MD5 hash.
Not quite. A collision attack generates two different inputs with the same MD5 hash. To compute a value with a given hash, you would need a preimage attack (or brute force).
In recent studies researchers have found that BT maize (corn) can cause serious health problems in mammals.
Government scientists also read these things. See what the Australian & NZ Food Standards agency said about it. To paraphrase: "Oh, those guys again. Still using the suspect statistics that were criticised the last time they used them. This isn't evidence for any harmful effect."
Please don't confuse some of the evil things Monsanto does with the safety of GM as a whole.
Professor Jonathan Jones is senior scientist for The Sainsbury Laboratory, based at the John Innes Centre, a research centre in plant and microbial science
1.calling it man-made is complete speculation at the current point(yes it is, there's correlation at best, no proof of causality)
If you leave human influences out of the models, they diverge significantly from real measurements. If you put that influence in, the model results track real world results. This is in the IPCC report. Whether you call it "proof" is a bit philosophical, but it's definitely well beyond "complete speculation".
2.calling it warming is kind of fucked up since it's warming in some places, and cooling in others
Overall it is warming. Nonetheless, you're right that it's oversimplistic, and this is why we often now talk about "climate change" rather than "global warming".