The real value of this "laptop" is "can I barter this fancy toy to take care of some REAL needs like food, clean water, and vaccines so I can live a little bit longer." Seriously, have you ever stepped outside of your own neighborhood, much less your own country?
Yes, I have lived for years outside the US, in places like Cali, Colombia; Yuroslavl, Russia; and spent time travelling around small towns in Mexico and Brazil, and to villages deep in the jungle of Colombia reachable only by boat. I speak Spanish fluently and am married to a woman from a poor barrio in Cali, where her family still lives and we visit regularly. So I'm pretty familiar with live in the third world. I haven't lived in the slums of Mexico City or anything silmilar, so I'm less familiar with the plight of the desperately poor, although I'm sure I've had more contact with them than the average American.
You mention a few random "insolvable" problems: lack of rain in Nigeria, religious intolerance, and despotism. Negroponte and company seem to have decided the best way to deal with problems in the world is to give the people that face them the same tool that they use to deal with theirs: information and reasoning. Sure, they use money, too, that's a very important tool, but education dramatically increases your ability to get money.
I don't think the plan is to hand out laptops instead of food in refuge camps. I've somehow gotten the impression they were a little smarter than that, they seem to be planning on providing these to school systems where children are already gathering to learn (yes, they have those even in poor villages). Already many poor families do everything possible to acquire education for their children, because they understand it's a way for them to escape, giving them access to modern tools may help improve that.
All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out
This would be great. But let's not forget that one of the et.al's in this case is Microsoft, who seems determined to do everything possible to defeat Google at the search game. They have gobs of cash and as a convicted monopolist have a proven history of being willing to do unethical things to get ahead. Maybe they'll decide they dislike the telecos syphoning off money more than they dislike Google being king of the search engines, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
Well, I read the book in Spanish, where the title is Camino al futuro literally "Road to the Future". I should have checked the English title before posting. Oh, and I read Being Digital in Spanish, too, so it wasn't a matter of reading one in English and the other in Spanish.
I find it particularly amusing that Bill Gates is one of Negroponte's critics. Of the two, Negroponte is much more of a visionary. This is really obvious if you compare Gates' book Road to the Future with Negroponte's Being Digital. Negroponte identifies things that make you smack your forehead and say "oh, wow! Of course!" (Not that I had a sore spot on my forehead after reading it or anything like that). Gates talks about minor evolutions of things that most people in the industry wouldn't find terribly surprising or imaginative.
I thought the most interesting thing about this was Negroponte saying "The hundred-dollar laptop is an educaton project. It's not a laptop project."
Given that, it hardly matters what OS it runs, as long as school systems, educators, and students have the ability to write and run the educational software they need on it.
IMHO, the real value of a machine like this in a students hands (especially if they are taught programming) is that they learn problem solving, not just information.
I agree that fossil fuels don't include the external costs of global warming, and therefore are not at their correct economic price.
I'm less sure that gas taxes are the right way to deal with that, although the are certainly better than nothing. One reason this is a problem is that it's not just gasoline, but all fossil fuels that are a problem -- gas taxes alone will not prevent people from doing stupid things like burning coal to produce hydrogen or alcohol which aren't taxed.
The better way to deal with it would be determine the sustainable amount of carbon dioxide we can emit, chop it in half to be really sure, and produce tradable emission rights. If you don't have the right to the emissions, you can't emit it. The market will set the correct price for the emission rights.
The big problem with my plan is enforcement, you'd probably have to require the producers of the fuel to have the emission rights rather than the emitter.
If you were going to do taxes though, the right way is to make a law that requires 10 cent per gallon increase every 6 months for the next 50 years, so that:
1. People would know gas is going to keep getting more and more expensive and start seriously looking for ways to reduce their consumption
2. People won't be slammed by it all at once, they'll have time to change their behavior without dramatic economic impact.
Yup, what America really needs a fascist dictator in charge to make things happen, oh wait...
Or a war. In WWII the US switched much of it's agricultural machinery to run on alcohol, which many farmers produced themselves. Gasoline was highly rationed.
I wouldn't want to buy these even if they were half the price of a DVD -- they appear to be based on Window Media Player 10, which locks me in to a single platform for viewing content.
For all the griping people do about the iTunes DRM (and I agree iTunes would be a better service without DRM), at least I still have a choice of platforms I can list to music I buy from them -- including the most important: my CD player.
but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.
People over 50 and people like Slashdot readers who keep reading about this lawsuit.
While there is a strong correlation between poverty and birthrate, there is an even stronger correlation between education level of women and birthrate. Statistically th more education a woman has (and thus presumably the more opportunity she has to pursue a fufilling life outside of childraising) the fewer children she will have. This cuts across socio-economic and religious lines, as you can see by the links below.
The most effective way to ensure low birth rates is to give educational opportunities to women.
How long until Cringely announces the details of the upcoming Apple/Intel/Nokia merger?
Actually that would be Dvorak who announces that, to one-up on Cringely for one-upping on him. Then Cringely will predict the Sony/IBM/Nintendo merger.
...Not a bit of risk, and if it can't be done for those sums, well, no harm done to the treasury.
I think there is considerable risk in having a private corporation trying deliver power from space to a receiving station in the United States. If you disagree we can site the receiving station next to your house.
Search: Maybe I'm missing something, but name one somewhat modern OS without a built in search function.
At least with search, I think the main point is how thoroughly it's integrated with the entire OS, and how omnipresent it is. While not revolutionary, I think it's at least a nice evolutionary step.
Info Display Panel: No idea what this is. But it sounds like a web browser to me. It could be the single thing in this list worth fighting about though.
At least for OS X, it's like a layer of windows that contain small useful utilities that are usually hidden but can be overlayed on the screen with a touch of a button. You can see a demo here. For OS X, this seems like a nice useability enhancement that fits well with Expose, their window management feature. Unfortunately I've never seen a demo of the similar feature in Longhorn, can anyone provide a link?
It has killed the main thing that made Windows immortal. It destroyed the perception widely held in the early 90s that everything would eventually move to Windows. As a result, people are willing to consider alternate platforms, and those who take them up are more often than not finding advantages.
I love the work Apple has done with OS X, but without Linux having broken the "Windows everywhere" mindset, OS X wouldn't be getting much attention.
Increasingly, computer experts are seeing a OS monoculture as a bad thing, which is a huge change from the early 90s. And it was Linux that made that possible.
Incidentally this software bundle thing; how come MS got stung for bundled apps, yet Apple get away with it? Surely they have the monopoly on Apple kit, or am I missing something here?
Yes, you are missing bunch.
1. At least in the US, there is nothing illegal about being a monopoly, what is illegal is using that monopoly position in one market to give yourself an advantage in another market by artificially tying products together.
2. Microsoft was accused (and as I understand it convicted) of tying the browser to Windows. There were also other issues, such as illegally trying to divide up a market with a competitor (Windows Media vs. Quicktime, they offered Apple free reign of the Mac market with Quicktime if Apple would stop trying to compete in the Windows market with Quicktime). But AFAIK they were never in trouble for bundling anything other than Windows Media and IE.
3. Apple is not a monopoly in any market. Not PCs (3-5% market share). Not music downloads (70%). Not portable music players (60%). Nor are they artifically tying the areas where they have a strong market present (digital music) with places where they are weak (PC market).
4. Even if Apple had 90+% of the PC market for OS's (replacing the MS monopoly there), bundling the Safari web browser would still not be an issue necessarily, because a) they also bundle MS Internet Explorer, and b) they don't do anything to discourage people from using competing products (Firefox, etc..)
8) People realize it's better to watch movies in the comfort of their living room with friends, and sales fall off. 9) Apple comes out with iFlix and delivers DVD quality movies to the Mac Mini in your living room via a Netflix-like queue and with TiVo style recording features. 10) Netflix and TiVo sue Apple:-)
Betamax was limited to one hour record time, and couldn't be used to record entire moviews. Sony misunderstood how important a use that would be for the device. The myth of Betamax's superiority has to do with the area it was better at: it was able to produce a slightly better quality picture. Given how many TV sets I saw in those days where everyone looked sunburned, I think the average viewing audience just didn't notice the difference. There's more on the history of that format war here: Betamax vs. VHS
Slashdot Mirror
...because it will just hasten the day when fax dies out in favor of pure digital means of information transmission.
The real value of this "laptop" is "can I barter this fancy toy to take care of some REAL needs like food, clean water, and vaccines so I can live a little bit longer." Seriously, have you ever stepped outside of your own neighborhood, much less your own country?
Yes, I have lived for years outside the US, in places like Cali, Colombia; Yuroslavl, Russia; and spent time travelling around small towns in Mexico and Brazil, and to villages deep in the jungle of Colombia reachable only by boat. I speak Spanish fluently and am married to a woman from a poor barrio in Cali, where her family still lives and we visit regularly. So I'm pretty familiar with live in the third world. I haven't lived in the slums of Mexico City or anything silmilar, so I'm less familiar with the plight of the desperately poor, although I'm sure I've had more contact with them than the average American.
You mention a few random "insolvable" problems: lack of rain in Nigeria, religious intolerance, and despotism. Negroponte and company seem to have decided the best way to deal with problems in the world is to give the people that face them the same tool that they use to deal with theirs: information and reasoning. Sure, they use money, too, that's a very important tool, but education dramatically increases your ability to get money.
I don't think the plan is to hand out laptops instead of food in refuge camps. I've somehow gotten the impression they were a little smarter than that, they seem to be planning on providing these to school systems where children are already gathering to learn (yes, they have those even in poor villages). Already many poor families do everything possible to acquire education for their children, because they understand it's a way for them to escape, giving them access to modern tools may help improve that.
All Amazon, Google, Yahoo! et al need to do is agree not to cave in to the telcos demands for more money (they *are* presumably paying for their own connectivity, yes?) and sit it out
This would be great. But let's not forget that one of the et.al's in this case is Microsoft, who seems determined to do everything possible to defeat Google at the search game. They have gobs of cash and as a convicted monopolist have a proven history of being willing to do unethical things to get ahead. Maybe they'll decide they dislike the telecos syphoning off money more than they dislike Google being king of the search engines, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
Well, I read the book in Spanish, where the title is Camino al futuro literally "Road to the Future". I should have checked the English title before posting. Oh, and I read Being Digital in Spanish, too, so it wasn't a matter of reading one in English and the other in Spanish.
I find it particularly amusing that Bill Gates is one of Negroponte's critics. Of the two, Negroponte is much more of a visionary. This is really obvious if you compare Gates' book Road to the Future with Negroponte's Being Digital. Negroponte identifies things that make you smack your forehead and say "oh, wow! Of course!" (Not that I had a sore spot on my forehead after reading it or anything like that). Gates talks about minor evolutions of things that most people in the industry wouldn't find terribly surprising or imaginative.
I thought the most interesting thing about this was Negroponte saying "The hundred-dollar laptop is an educaton project. It's not a laptop project."
Given that, it hardly matters what OS it runs, as long as school systems, educators, and students have the ability to write and run the educational software they need on it.
IMHO, the real value of a machine like this in a students hands (especially if they are taught programming) is that they learn problem solving, not just information.
I agree that fossil fuels don't include the external costs of global warming, and therefore are not at their correct economic price.
I'm less sure that gas taxes are the right way to deal with that, although the are certainly better than nothing. One reason this is a problem is that it's not just gasoline, but all fossil fuels that are a problem -- gas taxes alone will not prevent people from doing stupid things like burning coal to produce hydrogen or alcohol which aren't taxed.
The better way to deal with it would be determine the sustainable amount of carbon dioxide we can emit, chop it in half to be really sure, and produce tradable emission rights. If you don't have the right to the emissions, you can't emit it. The market will set the correct price for the emission rights.
The big problem with my plan is enforcement, you'd probably have to require the producers of the fuel to have the emission rights rather than the emitter.
If you were going to do taxes though, the right way is to make a law that requires 10 cent per gallon increase every 6 months for the next 50 years, so that:
1. People would know gas is going to keep getting more and more expensive and start seriously looking for ways to reduce their consumption
2. People won't be slammed by it all at once, they'll have time to change their behavior without dramatic economic impact.
Yup, what America really needs a fascist dictator in charge to make things happen, oh wait...
Or a war. In WWII the US switched much of it's agricultural machinery to run on alcohol, which many farmers produced themselves. Gasoline was highly rationed.
So a war... oh wait, we've already got one...
I wouldn't want to buy these even if they were half the price of a DVD -- they appear to be based on Window Media Player 10, which locks me in to a single platform for viewing content.
For all the griping people do about the iTunes DRM (and I agree iTunes would be a better service without DRM), at least I still have a choice of platforms I can list to music I buy from them -- including the most important: my CD player.
but only people who are over the age of 50 would even be old enough to remember the Beatles and specifically the name "Apple" being associated with them.
People over 50 and people like Slashdot readers who keep reading about this lawsuit.
While there is a strong correlation between poverty and birthrate, there is an even stronger correlation between education level of women and birthrate. Statistically th more education a woman has (and thus presumably the more opportunity she has to pursue a fufilling life outside of childraising) the fewer children she will have. This cuts across socio-economic and religious lines, as you can see by the links below.
/
c ators/Human_Population/Women/The_Status_of_Women1. htm
The most effective way to ensure low birth rates is to give educational opportunities to women.
http://www.uni-protokolle.de/nachrichten/id/39996
http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Edu
Mod me flame-bait if you like. I'm not ignorant enough to get modded "interesting". ... and yet you were modded "interesting" twice. Odd that.
They will ask their computer to please play the home movie and it will break the feeble 1024 bit encryption in 4.2381 milliseconds*.
* on 87 THz Intel-iBM PowerX86. Not tested on AMD GigaSparcAlpha processors.
How long until Cringely announces the details of the upcoming Apple/Intel/Nokia merger?
Actually that would be Dvorak who announces that, to one-up on Cringely for one-upping on him. Then Cringely will predict the Sony/IBM/Nintendo merger.
...Not a bit of risk, and if it can't be done for those sums, well, no harm done to the treasury.
I think there is considerable risk in having a private corporation trying deliver power from space to a receiving station in the United States. If you disagree we can site the receiving station next to your house.
This should be easily defeatable by OSS projects by changing the server id string whenever an MS search bot indexes it.
Search: Maybe I'm missing something, but name one somewhat modern OS without a built in search function.
At least with search, I think the main point is how thoroughly it's integrated with the entire OS, and how omnipresent it is. While not revolutionary, I think it's at least a nice evolutionary step.
Info Display Panel: No idea what this is. But it sounds like a web browser to me. It could be the single thing in this list worth fighting about though.
At least for OS X, it's like a layer of windows that contain small useful utilities that are usually hidden but can be overlayed on the screen with a touch of a button. You can see a demo here. For OS X, this seems like a nice useability enhancement that fits well with Expose, their window management feature. Unfortunately I've never seen a demo of the similar feature in Longhorn, can anyone provide a link?
1) send homemade porn video to movie studio
2) wait a day or two for them to share it with friends
3) sue movie studio under new law
4) PROFIT!!!!
hmm... and of course, since I'm posting this on slashdot:
0) find attractive girl willing to appear in homemade porn video
It has killed the main thing that made Windows immortal. It destroyed the perception widely held in the early 90s that everything would eventually move to Windows. As a result, people are willing to consider alternate platforms, and those who take them up are more often than not finding advantages.
I love the work Apple has done with OS X, but without Linux having broken the "Windows everywhere" mindset, OS X wouldn't be getting much attention.
Increasingly, computer experts are seeing a OS monoculture as a bad thing, which is a huge change from the early 90s. And it was Linux that made that possible.
Incidentally this software bundle thing; how come MS got stung for bundled apps, yet Apple get away with it? Surely they have the monopoly on Apple kit, or am I missing something here?
Yes, you are missing bunch.
1. At least in the US, there is nothing illegal about being a monopoly, what is illegal is using that monopoly position in one market to give yourself an advantage in another market by artificially tying products together.
2. Microsoft was accused (and as I understand it convicted) of tying the browser to Windows. There were also other issues, such as illegally trying to divide up a market with a competitor (Windows Media vs. Quicktime, they offered Apple free reign of the Mac market with Quicktime if Apple would stop trying to compete in the Windows market with Quicktime). But AFAIK they were never in trouble for bundling anything other than Windows Media and IE.
3. Apple is not a monopoly in any market. Not PCs (3-5% market share). Not music downloads (70%). Not portable music players (60%). Nor are they artifically tying the areas where they have a strong market present (digital music) with places where they are weak (PC market).
4. Even if Apple had 90+% of the PC market for OS's (replacing the MS monopoly there), bundling the Safari web browser would still not be an issue necessarily, because a) they also bundle MS Internet Explorer, and b) they don't do anything to discourage people from using competing products (Firefox, etc..)
8) People realize it's better to watch movies in the comfort of their living room with friends, and sales fall off. :-)
9) Apple comes out with iFlix and delivers DVD quality movies to the Mac Mini in your living room via a Netflix-like queue and with TiVo style recording features.
10) Netflix and TiVo sue Apple
When you only have one mouse button you tend to find extra time for other things.
Proof that Steve Jobs was right! A single mouse button improves productivity!!
Betamax was limited to one hour record time, and couldn't be used to record entire moviews. Sony misunderstood how important a use that would be for the device. The myth of Betamax's superiority has to do with the area it was better at: it was able to produce a slightly better quality picture. Given how many TV sets I saw in those days where everyone looked sunburned, I think the average viewing audience just didn't notice the difference. There's more on the history of that format war here: Betamax vs. VHS
Just because you can't think of an example doesn't mean they don't exist:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/
What open source has apple given back to the world?
What open source has apple given back to the world?
What open source have you given back to the world?