It has to go this way for V to eventually be able to come and free us!
It shows how unfaithful the movie was to the spirit and political ideals of alan moore's comic, that the message you received is to wait for some superhero to come and free you.
One of the most important difference b/w how Exchange and Wave work is that the later is hosted by Google and hence controlled by it.
Bullshit. It is an open protocol. In fact, I plan to run my own wave server whenever code for it is released. If this takes off like google hopes, every company/institution will be running its own wave server just like today it runs its own email server.
I wonder what BeOS had, that was so good. I mean, was it a scheduler thing? Or was it the pervasive multithreadedness that the OS almost forced upon the developers? Whatever it is, it worked like black magic: BeOS would always listen to the user input, no matter what the heck it was doing in the background, no matter what insane load was on the CPU - your mouseclicks were always reacted upon immediately, your drags were always reacted upon immediately, your typing, resizing, brushstrokes, midi-signals, whatever, always, under any circumstance, were immediately and smoothly followed by the correct response.
I know nothing of beos. However, my perception is that the only time that a modern linux (probably also windows) becomes unresponsive, short of relly abusive load, is when an application hoards too much memory and gets the computer swapping heavily. At that point the scheduler cannot really prevent unresponsiveness, because it has to swap stuff in and back out whenever it changes the running task...
A modern OS kernel, however, often has a lot more in common with microkernel designs even if it's all running in a single address space. Take a look, for example, at the OpenSolaris network stack. Every component runs in a separate thread and communicates with those above and below via message passing. It would be trivial to separate these out into different userspace processes, but there's no real advantage to doing so.
No advantages? Apart from the fact that suddenly, the OS can enforce the fact that you are using message passing, rather than shared memory? Or the fact that a kernel component can crash/be compromised without necessarily crashing/compromising the whole system. The one strong argument against microkernels has always been performance, and as the number of cores increases it is less and less relevant...
(...) Apple shouldn't have had to convince AT&T to carry its phone, there should be a generic standard like RJ-11 where we can plug our phones into their network, and they move the bits. If they want to innovate on top of the bit moving, great, but don't their ownership of the devices is the problem that is stifling the market.
There is such a standard, in fact multiple such standards such as GSM, UMTS, etc. I for one would be in favor of giving this a big regulatory kick (like: forbid phone exclusivity deals, sim locking, etc). But unless that happens, the only other way to get an open network is to not buy the closed one. I have never bought a carrier-locked phone, and in fact never subscribed to a contract with a mobile carrier. Here in austria i bought my phone at a shop, my SIM card at a supermaket (in cash) and I spend about 5 euros per month on calls/sms (no internet since the only time I would need it is when I am abroad, and no one is yet offering reasonable rates for worldwide or at least europewide coverage). Prepaid options are probably not as attractive in the US, and swapping the SIM when you go abroad isn't as much of an issue (given geographic isolation of the US.. you know, an ocean or two). But still, people should simply refuse to buy carrier-locked phones.
And what does it mean in practice ? The way dsl providers and large telco's "discriminate" in traffic is by peering relationships (e.g. with google). If a site is big enough and has enough money, they can get a direct private link into their network, whereas they let cheap content providers who won't pay (*cough* cogent *cough*) have only a single connection and then let it overflow. They refuse to expand that connection, except if cogent pays a large fee, which they simply won't do.
Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ? The first would be a very good thing for competition, the second would be very bad indeed.(...)
The point is that cable providers sell you internet.. but also cable TV. So they want to stop you from accessing streaming TV over IP (unless they get a share of the money). Similarly, DSL providers sell you internet... but also phone. So they want to stop you from accessing VOIP telephony from somebody else (again, unless they get their cut). Basically, they want to control what you can do with the internet connection you pay for so they can squeeze more money out of you. If they were allowed to start doing this, they might not stop there of course. The scenario of content providers having to pay for "fast" (meaning not gimped) access for their customers seems remote, but who knows. Loss of freedom of speech etc is just collateral damage.
Does this mean that it's de-facto illegal for providers to deliver voip service that keeps working well when you're torrenting ?
Maybe I'm just feeding a troll. But no, it's not about "prohibiting" QoS. It is about prohibiting discriminating against competitors. If I have a QoS rule that says voip has priority over torrents, that's fine, so long as it applies to ALL voip use, including third party voip providers. What they should not be allowed to do is prioritize the content they sell you (their IPTV/voip/etc) at the expense of everyone else (youtube/another voip provider/etc).
The european parliament rejected software patents with a vote of 648 to 15 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/eu_bins_swpat/. Yes, the EPTO has been lobbied into (illegally, I would say, but then IANAL) granting software patents, but then you can't enforce them.
I'd say Wave and Jabber are in similar situations in this regard. Both are open (even sharing the same protocol partly) and people do run their own Jabber servers, but as with Jabber there are already entrenched server vendors and service providers for communication and that's a lot of momentum to overcome
Jabber is a nice open IM protocol. So it's interoperable, but other than that what big advantages does it have over Skype, MSN, etc? Wave OTH is a totally new concept and, if people like it, and if the entrenched players do not provide it, they will lose users pretty fast. Also you can easily implement a wave robot that basically acts as a proxy to wave for your IM of choice (so long as the IM protocol is public or has been successfully reverse engineered)
Perhaps they make money by commoditizing some of the products of their potential competitors in the online advertisement arena. Social networking sites, blogs, messaging, email, etc, can all be reimplemented in a cool, interoperable way on top of wave. If this takes off, it will take a bite out of closed playgrounds such as facebook et al.
Standard certs do nothing to establish identity. They merely establish that the site is not being spoofed. Thus, the purpose of the whois email verification is not to prevent illegitimate sites from getting certs. The purpose of the whois email verification is to ensure that I can't get a cert for www.bankofamerica.com, hack an ISP's DNS server to redirect their traffic to my site, and pose as Bank of America. For those purposes, it is sufficient to merely require that the domain owners confirm via email that the request was authorized.
..right.. but how does the email get delivered? if the bad guy has hacked the right dns server he can tailor the MX record as well and get the "confirm you want a certificate" email delivered to himself...
Some years ago, the C++ committee went off into template la-la land. Most of the work there focuses on template features that will be used by few, and used correctly by fewer.
As a user of the STL and various boost libraries, I use a lot of fancy template magic WITHOUT having to know about it. The only problem with that is that I get complicated error messages from inside these libraries, because the compiler does not know that the mistake is really in my code (for, say, passing a parameter to some template function that is const and shouldn't be).
The goal of concepts is to be a feature that (a) you do not have to know about unless you write your own templated classes, and (b) allows the compiler to give meaningful error messages when you misuse someone else's template. In the above example, it would just say "passing parameter 2 to this function discards the const qualifier" or some such thing. I do not see any la-la-la here. It's a pity it won't make it into this standard.
I've been following C++0x for a long time now, and have been looking forward to it, but now I'm not so sure I'll ever use it. I was looking forward to Concepts more than anything and with that gone, it seems like a extremely minor upgrade. Also, even when the spec does come out, how many years before we can trust that most compilers can use it effectively... two, three?
It's not that bad. Many of the simple, neat features (like auto typing and initializer lists) are available already. Also, many of the library improvements are just standardizations of existing libraries, so it won't take that long for implementations to catch up. The main reason for all this is that one of the criteria for inclusion of a feature into the standard was the existance of an implementation. And this is why concepts were dropped. There is the conceptGCC implementation, but several people were not satisfied with the design of concepts that conceptGCC implements. If the decision was made to change that design, concepts were not standard-ready anymore (no existing implementation).
Whilst DRM was still being used, it made sense and was perfectly reasonable to fight people trying to hack the iPod via the DMCA. The Apple legal department clearly had standing orders to do that.
But once music stopped being sold with DRM, it then became pointless to fight the hackery. The DMCA is not relevant where media files are unprotected by technology.
Really? then why did ipods starting with the iPod touch (which AFAIRecall came out when DRM on the iTunes store was already dying out) use a hash of the database to make it harder for 3rd party software to load music files into the iPod? Notice that this is about ADDING files, not about copying them out, so it has nothing at all to do with piracy.
I would say exactly the opposite: the hash was added so that apple could keep the ipod tied to the itunes store even once DRM was out of the picture, by using a technical measure (the hash itself) and suing people implementing interoperable software based on the DMCA and a bogus claim that said hash was an "effective protection measure". The only thing I can conclude from TFS is that they were hoping not to encounter legal resistance from amateur hackers, and were proven wrong thanks to the EFF.
However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP. Giving children all around the world laptops is the more important goal than spreading FOSS, and the lack of a windows environment is what helped its competition grow and crush the project.
The goal is NOT to give children laptops. It is to help them get a basic education, and provide them with access to knowledge. Whether it runs MS office applications is less than irrelevant for that goal. Unless you think "education" is learning to perform whatever dumb task current office workers need to know how to do. I would say that a good background in basic math is a tad more important than proficiency in excel. Especially since excel 2025 will probably have more than a few differences from the current version (and that's assuming it will still be the dominant option).
If the goal is to teach children how to make a living with technology (...)
It's not. It's to provide an educational tool for them to learn reading and writing, math, history, basic science, and all those other things you are supposed to learn as a kid.
What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed?
The goal is NOT to turn kids into computer geeks. It's about providing them access to educational material on all basic subjects. It's about teaching them reading, math, history, and all the basic stuff you learn in primary school. At a total cost that is probably not so much higher than basic school books for a few years of school, but provides much wider access to knowledge.
Also, it is an experiment in modern educational methods, where you learn by doing, collaborating, etc, as opposed to passively receiving knowledge from a teacher.
Finally, this is not meant for places where people are starving. Obviously, if you are starving you need food, not an educational tool. It is meant for places where there is enough food, water, a teacher, and a school building that at least sometimes gets electricity. There are plenty of such places around the world. Just because one can't afford an SUV, doesn't mean he's starving.
Folks are going to manufacture and sell whatever it is that people are buying. If everyone's buying cheap little netbooks that do little more that provide a web browser, that's what will be available.
My point is that the cheap little netbook, or the cheap, low-end desktop computer, has enough power (and then some) to run all the fat applications, (except for very specific things), and probably comes pre-installed with a full suite of them. PCs do not get less powerful over time, and with all the research going into power efficiency the computing power-per-watt is increasing pretty fast...
Doesn't matter what kind of computer you have... Doesn't matter what browser you're running... Doesn't matter what OS you have... As long as you can load a web page, you can run the software. Even from your cell phone.
Portability is good.. but java is pretty portable as well (in fact, probably more since i think Java VMs have more consistent behavior than browsers). Plus, it is less inefficient, and less unpleasant as a development environment.
In a few years you may have one hell of a time finding a boxed copy of software to purchase. You might have a very hard time finding source code to download and compile. And even if you run it off your local machine, you might find all your software running through a web UI sitting on top of a local LAMP stack.
Why? the web is not a good model to develop for, from a developer's perspective. In fact, it sucks bigtime. It's a bunch of hacks hacked toghether. The only advantages are portability (and, as you mentioned, you can have that with a local LAMP stack), and, from a vendor's point of view, control. Now from the user's point of view, that same control is a downside. If you think of open source software, the same distinction applies, and I haven't seen this kill off open source.
But in 10 or 20 years it might be very difficult to buy a computer that isn't just a glorified thin client.
Why? when a cheapo, low end machine will have enough computing power to run all the fat apps anyways? I'm not saying that noone will make the transition, I can see the software maintenance cost advantage in a controlled/corporate setting, but to say that web apps will wipe out desktop apps is way wrong IMO.
Most software has been commoditized by open source (and other freeware), and the "oh but now it's on the cloud" argument isn't going to unspill that jar of milk.
I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.
Really? So who is going to stop me from running all those applications that are already available out there (and open source) on my own machine? I will not adopt a web app unless it has advantages large enough to balance out the fact that it needs internet connectivity to work AND that any information I put in it is irrevocably out of my control.
The 'community promise' does not extend to commercial downstream recipients of open source MONO applications !
I think that is incorrect. Quoting from the community promise itself (linked in article)
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation, to the extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications, and is compliant with all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification
It includes "using". So I do not receive the rights from the distributor of a MONO application, but I, as a user, am directly granted the right to use it from the microsoft community promise.
The fact that you have to conform to the standards is however a real restriction. It makes some sense, to avoid someone else playing an embrace-extend-hijack on them, like they tried with Java... however this also means that if I invent my own language+runtime D# that infringes on some microsoft C# patents this does not protect me.
Organisms can acquire DNA from other organisms by inserting bits of foreign DNA, known as mobile DNA, into the genome. One way this is done is by viral infections. Some viruses integrate genomic material of their own, and sometimes of other host organisms into the hosts they infect. If those viruses happen to also infect germ cells â" sperm or ova â" those insertions or retrotransposons would be passed on to subsequent generations. It is quite easy to identify these viral insertions: they are flanked by characteristic DNA stretches called Long Terminal Repeats or LTRs. During the infection and insertion process, LTRs serve as âoeinsertion hooksâ
Easy to detect? wait till they start using polymorphism....
So, if I buy something that comes in a box that costs 1 cent to produce and 10 cents to dispose of, what happens if I don't dispose of it? What if I store something else in that box for 10 years? Do I get my money back?
Charging a disposal fee at time of purchase assumes a fixed future and does not reflect the rest of R's. Recycle, Reduce, AND REUSE!
Actually, it does reflect the "Reduce", at least, since those 10 extra cents might make the manufacturer choose lighter packaging options. And about reuse... sure, we re-use the cardboard boxes of appliances sometimes, but honestly, there are more boxes than I have any use for. Also, do you also reuse the silly styrofoam packaging that meat comes in? or the stupid cookie-shaped plastic thingies that cookies come in? I would say that re-use is not really relevant on a large scale where packaging is concerned.
The first benchmark on page 2 is 'Parallel BZIP2 Compression'. They are testing the speed of running bzip2, a CPU-intensive program, and drawing conclusions about the filesystem? Sure, there will be some time taken to read and write the large file from disk, but it is dwarfed by the computation time. (...) Surely a good filesystem benchmark is one that exercises the filesystem and the disk, but little else.
That's one type of benchmark. But you also want a benchmark that shows the performance of CPU-intensive appliations while the file system is under heavy use. Why? because the filesystem code itself uses CPU, and you want to make sure it doesn't use too much of it.
(...) It makes no sense for companies to have to recycle things that they made years down the line. There are some things that/will/ go obsolete no matter how "green" you design them.(...)
It's not about not making things obsolete. It's ultimately about the consumer paying the full cost of the object they purchase, instead of saddling the rest of society with it. If my 1 cent product packaging costs 10 cents to dispose of, it should cost 11 cents.
Mono is a free (GPL) reimplementation of commercial software. Isn't that how GNU got started in the first place? Didn't Stallman and friends reimplement the commercial Unix libraries as free (GPL) software? Wasn't he potentially violating patents? Why was it okay then when it's Unix, but not okay now when the technology came from Microsoft? Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)? (...)
SCO was suing on copyright grounds AFAIK, not on patent grounds. I would say a fundemental difference may well be the software patent landscape that we are currently living under, where it is to be expected that all sorts of trivial and non trivial "innovations" in the C sharp language are covered by software patents, that can be used to shut down anyone re-implementing the language. If microsoft comes up with a patent that some aspect of the linux kernel infringes on, the kernel can be patched to work around it. If they have a patent that a C sharp implementation cannot work around while still remaining compliant to the language standard, what do you do?
Slashdot Mirror
It has to go this way for V to eventually be able to come and free us!
It shows how unfaithful the movie was to the spirit and political ideals of alan moore's comic, that the message you received is to wait for some superhero to come and free you.
One of the most important difference b/w how Exchange and Wave work is that the later is hosted by Google and hence controlled by it.
Bullshit. It is an open protocol. In fact, I plan to run my own wave server whenever code for it is released. If this takes off like google hopes, every company/institution will be running its own wave server just like today it runs its own email server.
I wonder what BeOS had, that was so good. I mean, was it a scheduler thing? Or was it the pervasive multithreadedness that the OS almost forced upon the developers? Whatever it is, it worked like black magic: BeOS would always listen to the user input, no matter what the heck it was doing in the background, no matter what insane load was on the CPU - your mouseclicks were always reacted upon immediately, your drags were always reacted upon immediately, your typing, resizing, brushstrokes, midi-signals, whatever, always, under any circumstance, were immediately and smoothly followed by the correct response.
I know nothing of beos. However, my perception is that the only time that a modern linux (probably also windows) becomes unresponsive, short of relly abusive load, is when an application hoards too much memory and gets the computer swapping heavily. At that point the scheduler cannot really prevent unresponsiveness, because it has to swap stuff in and back out whenever it changes the running task...
A modern OS kernel, however, often has a lot more in common with microkernel designs even if it's all running in a single address space. Take a look, for example, at the OpenSolaris network stack. Every component runs in a separate thread and communicates with those above and below via message passing. It would be trivial to separate these out into different userspace processes, but there's no real advantage to doing so.
No advantages? Apart from the fact that suddenly, the OS can enforce the fact that you are using message passing, rather than shared memory? Or the fact that a kernel component can crash/be compromised without necessarily crashing/compromising the whole system. The one strong argument against microkernels has always been performance, and as the number of cores increases it is less and less relevant...
(...) Apple shouldn't have had to convince AT&T to carry its phone, there should be a generic standard like RJ-11 where we can plug our phones into their network, and they move the bits. If they want to innovate on top of the bit moving, great, but don't their ownership of the devices is the problem that is stifling the market.
There is such a standard, in fact multiple such standards such as GSM, UMTS, etc. I for one would be in favor of giving this a big regulatory kick (like: forbid phone exclusivity deals, sim locking, etc). But unless that happens, the only other way to get an open network is to not buy the closed one. I have never bought a carrier-locked phone, and in fact never subscribed to a contract with a mobile carrier. Here in austria i bought my phone at a shop, my SIM card at a supermaket (in cash) and I spend about 5 euros per month on calls/sms (no internet since the only time I would need it is when I am abroad, and no one is yet offering reasonable rates for worldwide or at least europewide coverage). Prepaid options are probably not as attractive in the US, and swapping the SIM when you go abroad isn't as much of an issue (given geographic isolation of the US.. you know, an ocean or two). But still, people should simply refuse to buy carrier-locked phones.
And what does it mean in practice ? The way dsl providers and large telco's "discriminate" in traffic is by peering relationships (e.g. with google). If a site is big enough and has enough money, they can get a direct private link into their network, whereas they let cheap content providers who won't pay (*cough* cogent *cough*) have only a single connection and then let it overflow. They refuse to expand that connection, except if cogent pays a large fee, which they simply won't do.
Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ? The first would be a very good thing for competition, the second would be very bad indeed.(...)
The point is that cable providers sell you internet.. but also cable TV. So they want to stop you from accessing streaming TV over IP (unless they get a share of the money). Similarly, DSL providers sell you internet... but also phone. So they want to stop you from accessing VOIP telephony from somebody else (again, unless they get their cut). Basically, they want to control what you can do with the internet connection you pay for so they can squeeze more money out of you. If they were allowed to start doing this, they might not stop there of course. The scenario of content providers having to pay for "fast" (meaning not gimped) access for their customers seems remote, but who knows. Loss of freedom of speech etc is just collateral damage.
Does this mean that it's de-facto illegal for providers to deliver voip service that keeps working well when you're torrenting ?
Maybe I'm just feeding a troll. But no, it's not about "prohibiting" QoS. It is about prohibiting discriminating against competitors. If I have a QoS rule that says voip has priority over torrents, that's fine, so long as it applies to ALL voip use, including third party voip providers. What they should not be allowed to do is prioritize the content they sell you (their IPTV/voip/etc) at the expense of everyone else (youtube/another voip provider/etc).
The european parliament rejected software patents with a vote of 648 to 15 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/eu_bins_swpat/. Yes, the EPTO has been lobbied into (illegally, I would say, but then IANAL) granting software patents, but then you can't enforce them.
I'd say Wave and Jabber are in similar situations in this regard. Both are open (even sharing the same protocol partly) and people do run their own Jabber servers, but as with Jabber there are already entrenched server vendors and service providers for communication and that's a lot of momentum to overcome
Jabber is a nice open IM protocol. So it's interoperable, but other than that what big advantages does it have over Skype, MSN, etc? Wave OTH is a totally new concept and, if people like it, and if the entrenched players do not provide it, they will lose users pretty fast. Also you can easily implement a wave robot that basically acts as a proxy to wave for your IM of choice (so long as the IM protocol is public or has been successfully reverse engineered)
Perhaps they make money by commoditizing some of the products of their potential competitors in the online advertisement arena. Social networking sites, blogs, messaging, email, etc, can all be reimplemented in a cool, interoperable way on top of wave. If this takes off, it will take a bite out of closed playgrounds such as facebook et al.
Standard certs do nothing to establish identity. They merely establish that the site is not being spoofed. Thus, the purpose of the whois email verification is not to prevent illegitimate sites from getting certs. The purpose of the whois email verification is to ensure that I can't get a cert for www.bankofamerica.com, hack an ISP's DNS server to redirect their traffic to my site, and pose as Bank of America. For those purposes, it is sufficient to merely require that the domain owners confirm via email that the request was authorized.
..right.. but how does the email get delivered? if the bad guy has hacked the right dns server he can tailor the MX record as well and get the "confirm you want a certificate" email delivered to himself...
Some years ago, the C++ committee went off into template la-la land. Most of the work there focuses on template features that will be used by few, and used correctly by fewer.
As a user of the STL and various boost libraries, I use a lot of fancy template magic WITHOUT having to know about it. The only problem with that is that I get complicated error messages from inside these libraries, because the compiler does not know that the mistake is really in my code (for, say, passing a parameter to some template function that is const and shouldn't be).
The goal of concepts is to be a feature that (a) you do not have to know about unless you write your own templated classes, and (b) allows the compiler to give meaningful error messages when you misuse someone else's template. In the above example, it would just say "passing parameter 2 to this function discards the const qualifier" or some such thing. I do not see any la-la-la here. It's a pity it won't make it into this standard.
I've been following C++0x for a long time now, and have been looking forward to it, but now I'm not so sure I'll ever use it. I was looking forward to Concepts more than anything and with that gone, it seems like a extremely minor upgrade. Also, even when the spec does come out, how many years before we can trust that most compilers can use it effectively... two, three?
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.5/cxx0x_status.html
It's not that bad. Many of the simple, neat features (like auto typing and initializer lists) are available already. Also, many of the library improvements are just standardizations of existing libraries, so it won't take that long for implementations to catch up. The main reason for all this is that one of the criteria for inclusion of a feature into the standard was the existance of an implementation. And this is why concepts were dropped. There is the conceptGCC implementation, but several people were not satisfied with the design of concepts that conceptGCC implements. If the decision was made to change that design, concepts were not standard-ready anymore (no existing implementation).
Whilst DRM was still being used, it made sense and was perfectly reasonable to fight people trying to hack the iPod via the DMCA. The Apple legal department clearly had standing orders to do that.
But once music stopped being sold with DRM, it then became pointless to fight the hackery. The DMCA is not relevant where media files are unprotected by technology.
Really? then why did ipods starting with the iPod touch (which AFAIRecall came out when DRM on the iTunes store was already dying out) use a hash of the database to make it harder for 3rd party software to load music files into the iPod? Notice that this is about ADDING files, not about copying them out, so it has nothing at all to do with piracy.
I would say exactly the opposite: the hash was added so that apple could keep the ipod tied to the itunes store even once DRM was out of the picture, by using a technical measure (the hash itself) and suing people implementing interoperable software based on the DMCA and a bogus claim that said hash was an "effective protection measure". The only thing I can conclude from TFS is that they were hoping not to encounter legal resistance from amateur hackers, and were proven wrong thanks to the EFF.
However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP. Giving children all around the world laptops is the more important goal than spreading FOSS, and the lack of a windows environment is what helped its competition grow and crush the project.
The goal is NOT to give children laptops. It is to help them get a basic education, and provide them with access to knowledge. Whether it runs MS office applications is less than irrelevant for that goal. Unless you think "education" is learning to perform whatever dumb task current office workers need to know how to do. I would say that a good background in basic math is a tad more important than proficiency in excel. Especially since excel 2025 will probably have more than a few differences from the current version (and that's assuming it will still be the dominant option).
If the goal is to teach children how to make a living with technology (...)
It's not. It's to provide an educational tool for them to learn reading and writing, math, history, basic science, and all those other things you are supposed to learn as a kid.
What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed?
The goal is NOT to turn kids into computer geeks. It's about providing them access to educational material on all basic subjects. It's about teaching them reading, math, history, and all the basic stuff you learn in primary school. At a total cost that is probably not so much higher than basic school books for a few years of school, but provides much wider access to knowledge.
Also, it is an experiment in modern educational methods, where you learn by doing, collaborating, etc, as opposed to passively receiving knowledge from a teacher.
Finally, this is not meant for places where people are starving. Obviously, if you are starving you need food, not an educational tool. It is meant for places where there is enough food, water, a teacher, and a school building that at least sometimes gets electricity. There are plenty of such places around the world. Just because one can't afford an SUV, doesn't mean he's starving.
Folks are going to manufacture and sell whatever it is that people are buying. If everyone's buying cheap little netbooks that do little more that provide a web browser, that's what will be available.
My point is that the cheap little netbook, or the cheap, low-end desktop computer, has enough power (and then some) to run all the fat applications, (except for very specific things), and probably comes pre-installed with a full suite of them. PCs do not get less powerful over time, and with all the research going into power efficiency the computing power-per-watt is increasing pretty fast...
Doesn't matter what kind of computer you have... Doesn't matter what browser you're running... Doesn't matter what OS you have... As long as you can load a web page, you can run the software. Even from your cell phone.
Portability is good.. but java is pretty portable as well (in fact, probably more since i think Java VMs have more consistent behavior than browsers). Plus, it is less inefficient, and less unpleasant as a development environment.
Technology marches on.
I'm sure it does.
In a few years you may have one hell of a time finding a boxed copy of software to purchase. You might have a very hard time finding source code to download and compile. And even if you run it off your local machine, you might find all your software running through a web UI sitting on top of a local LAMP stack.
Why? the web is not a good model to develop for, from a developer's perspective. In fact, it sucks bigtime. It's a bunch of hacks hacked toghether. The only advantages are portability (and, as you mentioned, you can have that with a local LAMP stack), and, from a vendor's point of view, control. Now from the user's point of view, that same control is a downside. If you think of open source software, the same distinction applies, and I haven't seen this kill off open source.
But in 10 or 20 years it might be very difficult to buy a computer that isn't just a glorified thin client.
Why? when a cheapo, low end machine will have enough computing power to run all the fat apps anyways? I'm not saying that noone will make the transition, I can see the software maintenance cost advantage in a controlled/corporate setting, but to say that web apps will wipe out desktop apps is way wrong IMO.
Most software has been commoditized by open source (and other freeware), and the "oh but now it's on the cloud" argument isn't going to unspill that jar of milk.
I do NOT want everything to be a goddamn web app.
I'm not certain that's really something you get a choice in.
Really? So who is going to stop me from running all those applications that are already available out there (and open source) on my own machine? I will not adopt a web app unless it has advantages large enough to balance out the fact that it needs internet connectivity to work AND that any information I put in it is irrevocably out of my control.
The 'community promise' does not extend to commercial downstream recipients of open source MONO applications !
I think that is incorrect. Quoting from the community promise itself (linked in article)
Microsoft irrevocably promises not to assert any Microsoft Necessary Claims against you for making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing or distributing any implementation, to the extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications, and is compliant with all of the required parts of the mandatory provisions of that specification
It includes "using". So I do not receive the rights from the distributor of a MONO application, but I, as a user, am directly granted the right to use it from the microsoft community promise.
The fact that you have to conform to the standards is however a real restriction. It makes some sense, to avoid someone else playing an embrace-extend-hijack on them, like they tried with Java... however this also means that if I invent my own language+runtime D# that infringes on some microsoft C# patents this does not protect me.
Organisms can acquire DNA from other organisms by inserting bits of foreign DNA, known as mobile DNA, into the genome. One way this is done is by viral infections. Some viruses integrate genomic material of their own, and sometimes of other host organisms into the hosts they infect. If those viruses happen to also infect germ cells â" sperm or ova â" those insertions or retrotransposons would be passed on to subsequent generations. It is quite easy to identify these viral insertions: they are flanked by characteristic DNA stretches called Long Terminal Repeats or LTRs. During the infection and insertion process, LTRs serve as âoeinsertion hooksâ
Easy to detect? wait till they start using polymorphism....
So, if I buy something that comes in a box that costs 1 cent to produce and 10 cents to dispose of, what happens if I don't dispose of it? What if I store something else in that box for 10 years? Do I get my money back?
Charging a disposal fee at time of purchase assumes a fixed future and does not reflect the rest of R's. Recycle, Reduce, AND REUSE!
Actually, it does reflect the "Reduce", at least, since those 10 extra cents might make the manufacturer choose lighter packaging options. And about reuse... sure, we re-use the cardboard boxes of appliances sometimes, but honestly, there are more boxes than I have any use for. Also, do you also reuse the silly styrofoam packaging that meat comes in? or the stupid cookie-shaped plastic thingies that cookies come in? I would say that re-use is not really relevant on a large scale where packaging is concerned.
The first benchmark on page 2 is 'Parallel BZIP2 Compression'. They are testing the speed of running bzip2, a CPU-intensive program, and drawing conclusions about the filesystem? Sure, there will be some time taken to read and write the large file from disk, but it is dwarfed by the computation time. (...) Surely a good filesystem benchmark is one that exercises the filesystem and the disk, but little else.
That's one type of benchmark. But you also want a benchmark that shows the performance of CPU-intensive appliations while the file system is under heavy use. Why? because the filesystem code itself uses CPU, and you want to make sure it doesn't use too much of it.
(...) It makes no sense for companies to have to recycle things that they made years down the line. There are some things that /will/ go obsolete no matter how "green" you design them.(...)
It's not about not making things obsolete. It's ultimately about the consumer paying the full cost of the object they purchase, instead of saddling the rest of society with it. If my 1 cent product packaging costs 10 cents to dispose of, it should cost 11 cents.
Mono is a free (GPL) reimplementation of commercial software. Isn't that how GNU got started in the first place? Didn't Stallman and friends reimplement the commercial Unix libraries as free (GPL) software? Wasn't he potentially violating patents? Why was it okay then when it's Unix, but not okay now when the technology came from Microsoft? Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)? (...)
SCO was suing on copyright grounds AFAIK, not on patent grounds. I would say a fundemental difference may well be the software patent landscape that we are currently living under, where it is to be expected that all sorts of trivial and non trivial "innovations" in the C sharp language are covered by software patents, that can be used to shut down anyone re-implementing the language. If microsoft comes up with a patent that some aspect of the linux kernel infringes on, the kernel can be patched to work around it. If they have a patent that a C sharp implementation cannot work around while still remaining compliant to the language standard, what do you do?