MIT isn't "taking anything upon themselves". They can't force any government to order their laptops. If this was all misguided centrist hot-air, I can assure you that Chavez in Venezuela and Lula in Brazil would have a lot of political points to score by crapping all over it publically.
"Pressing problems" vs long term issues such as education is a complicated issue which varies from country to country, not one that can be assumed either way, generalised across the globe, and and merely stated.
Nice to see an actual opinion instead of a gut feeling masquerading as one, as in most comments on this topic. It's also something I had assumed wasn't there, hence my simple reply. My definition of strawman was "a weak or sham argument set up to be easily refuted", meaning your comment "need a laptop to get educated?" as I honestly interpreted it - saying that the claim of the $100 laptop was that it was a necessary part of education, in order to refute this and make it appear as if you'd pointed out some flaw in the idea.
Onward to the actual point... I believe that the laptop itself will be a brilliant tool. What you call "learning how to use a specific computer OS and the software on it", I call basic IT skills. Also, remember that the kids actually get to own the laptop, so it's not going to be a case of sitting in a school with an "overworked teacher" and all that jazz.
Each $100 (that forms part of the overall sums spent) could certainly be better spent on other things, that's obvious. It'd be far more effective, in the short term, to spend it on books and teachers. But you also have to put work into the foundations of IT knowledge. Building foundations is slow and boring, and not very instantly gratifying, but it's necessary (this will not ring true to you because you disagree with me on the educational value of the laptop, fair enough).
I'm very, very glad to see someone here saying something more intelligent than "this is dumb". That said, I still disagree, because a phone would be way less usable than a laptop for actual computing, and its steal-me rating would be through the roof. A free laptop aimed specifically at kids is of little interest, but a fully-functional phone, and a decent one at that, is something there would be a real black market for, whether the govt handed it out for free or not.
Or maybe the IT should be left to the IT experts? That way the governments can be free to work on providing other basic infrastructure and curbing inflation and all those other things those queer little poor countries do, right?
Nice strawman, dumbass. Need? No. But it helps. And that can be said with a straight face in MIT, the UN, and the likes of the Brazilian and Argentinian governments. None of those people saw the ludicrousness of the idea either. I side with them.
Dear me, maybe you should email the founders and funders of the $100 laptop project, its backers in the UN, and the several governments lined up to buy laptops from them! I'm sure they'll be relieved that someone who knew what they were talking about finally piped up and saved them from making a big mistake!
Not going to be taken seriously? Last time I checked, it was Windows that wasn't taken seriously, at least not by anyone with an opinion informed enough to matter - setting up a development environment in Windows is a bitch. In Linux it's trivial, KDE + compiler/parser alone is often enough. Maybe you're referring to clueless end users, which is a whole topic in itself.
It takes longer to boot because it has a radically different system architecture: it is built around modularity, stability and configurability, not speed. Windows has had very few events that would class as kernel releases, making optimisation and acceleration of the relatively few shipped systems more practical.
Plus, most normal peoples' Windows boxes take much longer to boot than an average bloaty Linux distro. As a result boot time is actually one of the few things they don't care about.
African village? I'm getting fairly bored of answering this question, so I'm just going to post a link to another instance of my answer instead. In case you can't be bothered with the link, my point is that IT experts make laptops, while governments provide infrastructure.
If there is poverty in the US, it is the responsibility of the US government, not the $100 laptop project. The project will happily supply them with educational laptops, however.
You think highlighting a small minority of the countries listed makes your point more convincing? Negroponte likes to think he's sending his laptop to starving kids, but the reality, the one you yourself have demonstrated in the list you retrieved, is otherwise.
What do you mean by "31337 sphere of influence"? Do you mean this News for Nerds website here? The one you're a long time visitor of? Or do you just mean not jumping to conclusions by misinterpreting ambiguities in baffling ways?
Poverty isn't a boolean variable, and you can't generalise the rest of the world into rural Ethiopia.
Nor can you just 'take' effort from one project and 'put' it into another. Tech experts can provide cheap hardware for educational purposes. They can't, at the whim of a Slashdot poster, become experts in manipulating the political forces of the world into providing basic infrastructure in other countries.
And besides, those things are the responsibility of governments. Governments, by the way, cannot design and build a $100 laptop for distribution to children. It takes tech experts to do this, and international support to fund it.
A programmer would understand this concept of different people sticking to what they are good at - it's called object orientation.
It's not a project to relieve poverty in the poorest of the poor countries. It's a project to provide an educational laptop to children in developing countries.
There is a big difference, but Slashdot as a whole (if such a concept is valid) seems not grasp it yet.
So your personal computing habits are the yardstick by which all IT products are to be measured?
When your argument is based exclusively on your opinions and personal experience, global absolutes like "this idea is bad" come off as arrogance. Phrases like "this is useless to me" are more accurate.
That's not a weakness, it's a characteristic inherent to the fundamental idea. To call it a "major weakness" is akin to scoffing at skateboards for their lack of a motor, or disparaging wallpaper for its poor performance as a security system.
I have about 700MB of RAM on my Celeron D laptop - this is fairly average hardware as I understand. I have never seen any of this fabled memory hogging, and I have the KDE system monitor in my taskbar at all times in order to identify just this kind of issue.
What it does suffer with is instability. While it was an improvement when I moved from Internet Explorer a few years back, Konqueror and Opera are both definitely better browsers. Familiarity with the UI, keyboard shortcuts, and the range of extensions are what keep me in Firefox, not the quality of the app itself - similar to what kept me in Windows for about a year after discovering Linux, incidentally.
Me for example: nearly two years into a "* Studies for Dummies" degree, which has been a major disappointment, spending all my time programming and all my (spare) money on related books. No impressive maths qualifications beyond the national minimum, and no formal recognition of computing skills.
Can anyone offer any words of advice, encouragement, or disdain about my growing urge to throw it all away and do something programming-related in a year or two? I'm talking about the UK, here by the way, in case you can't infer that from the linguistics of my post. "go for it" is very encouraging indeed, but more words would be welcome.
Seriously, Carmony really seems like a decent guy. Listen to him, you'll see what I mean. The Slashdot smart asses usually crap all over Linspire's quality, security, morality, business model, and so on and so on, but give the guy a chance, he's not all bad.
If you've trademarked it, or just trademarked *.com, then I reckon it's got to be similar to the case of Mike Rowe Soft, which Microsoft rightly lost. But the two situations aren't equal, so who knows? Lawyer! Lawyer knows! Cue lawyer! Now!
Is this actually a virus, or just another lame trojan? I tell you, most of the time they say there's a new virus, I start looking into how vulnerable I am, then the "virus" turns out to be yet another fucking IM trojan, and I've lost half an hour of important using-the-internet time that I can never get back.
I think it's telling that there is no information on this at all, just a load of scaremongering bullshit about my "pet" computer.
Being proactive though, one thing I'd like to see in a future version of KDE is a file scanner, like in the right-click menu and as an icon on the desktop.
One thing's for sure, the AV companies need to understand something: we're not going to pay for closed source Windowsesque AV software companies to hold our machines for ransom and squander our system resources, when security has always been such a strong point of Open Source. Someone will make a free, central, collaborative definitions/signatures database, updates will be free, we'll continue to laugh our asses off, and they'll come up with a new lie to tell about how terrible Open Source is.
I'm not referring to most of your post, just the part relevant to this particular subtopic, more specifically, "makes you want to tease him more". It's kind of true that if someone pre-emptively takes the role of victim, they are inviting someone else to take the role of bully, but your phrasing is needlessly inflammatory and you imply that it makes it the victim's fault.
Sounds like the wounds are still there, mate. You might want to look into getting them looked at, if you know what I mean, because you just lashed out at a slashdotter witht the word "jock". It's clearly still affecting the way you interpret what people say and do (as retarded as the grandparent post may be).
My Official Question: Does anybody apart from me completely ignore the "You can keep ALL your email!!" thing, and purge regularly anyway?
Imagine years and years of correspondence, complete with a great search system, and all you have to do to get at it is to log a few key presses.
The 99% of the time that I'm safe behind Linux isn't the high risk time anyway. The risk comes in the half a dozen times a year I'll need to check my email on a Windows box or a public machine.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pressing problems" vs long term issues such as education is a complicated issue which varies from country to country, not one that can be assumed either way, generalised across the globe, and and merely stated.
Onward to the actual point... I believe that the laptop itself will be a brilliant tool. What you call "learning how to use a specific computer OS and the software on it", I call basic IT skills. Also, remember that the kids actually get to own the laptop, so it's not going to be a case of sitting in a school with an "overworked teacher" and all that jazz.
Each $100 (that forms part of the overall sums spent) could certainly be better spent on other things, that's obvious. It'd be far more effective, in the short term, to spend it on books and teachers. But you also have to put work into the foundations of IT knowledge. Building foundations is slow and boring, and not very instantly gratifying, but it's necessary (this will not ring true to you because you disagree with me on the educational value of the laptop, fair enough).
I'm very, very glad to see someone here saying something more intelligent than "this is dumb". That said, I still disagree, because a phone would be way less usable than a laptop for actual computing, and its steal-me rating would be through the roof. A free laptop aimed specifically at kids is of little interest, but a fully-functional phone, and a decent one at that, is something there would be a real black market for, whether the govt handed it out for free or not.
Or maybe the IT should be left to the IT experts? That way the governments can be free to work on providing other basic infrastructure and curbing inflation and all those other things those queer little poor countries do, right?
Nice strawman, dumbass. Need? No. But it helps. And that can be said with a straight face in MIT, the UN, and the likes of the Brazilian and Argentinian governments. None of those people saw the ludicrousness of the idea either. I side with them.
Dear me, maybe you should email the founders and funders of the $100 laptop project, its backers in the UN, and the several governments lined up to buy laptops from them! I'm sure they'll be relieved that someone who knew what they were talking about finally piped up and saved them from making a big mistake!
It takes longer to boot because it has a radically different system architecture: it is built around modularity, stability and configurability, not speed. Windows has had very few events that would class as kernel releases, making optimisation and acceleration of the relatively few shipped systems more practical.
Plus, most normal peoples' Windows boxes take much longer to boot than an average bloaty Linux distro. As a result boot time is actually one of the few things they don't care about.
If there is poverty in the US, it is the responsibility of the US government, not the $100 laptop project. The project will happily supply them with educational laptops, however.
What do you mean by "31337 sphere of influence"? Do you mean this News for Nerds website here? The one you're a long time visitor of? Or do you just mean not jumping to conclusions by misinterpreting ambiguities in baffling ways?
Poverty isn't a boolean variable, and you can't generalise the rest of the world into rural Ethiopia.
Nor can you just 'take' effort from one project and 'put' it into another. Tech experts can provide cheap hardware for educational purposes. They can't, at the whim of a Slashdot poster, become experts in manipulating the political forces of the world into providing basic infrastructure in other countries.
And besides, those things are the responsibility of governments. Governments, by the way, cannot design and build a $100 laptop for distribution to children. It takes tech experts to do this, and international support to fund it.
A programmer would understand this concept of different people sticking to what they are good at - it's called object orientation.
It's not a project to relieve poverty in the poorest of the poor countries. It's a project to provide an educational laptop to children in developing countries.
There is a big difference, but Slashdot as a whole (if such a concept is valid) seems not grasp it yet.
When your argument is based exclusively on your opinions and personal experience, global absolutes like "this idea is bad" come off as arrogance. Phrases like "this is useless to me" are more accurate.
That's not a weakness, it's a characteristic inherent to the fundamental idea. To call it a "major weakness" is akin to scoffing at skateboards for their lack of a motor, or disparaging wallpaper for its poor performance as a security system.
Yeah! A list of cool extensions? I take it all back! +digg!
What it does suffer with is instability. While it was an improvement when I moved from Internet Explorer a few years back, Konqueror and Opera are both definitely better browsers. Familiarity with the UI, keyboard shortcuts, and the range of extensions are what keep me in Firefox, not the quality of the app itself - similar to what kept me in Windows for about a year after discovering Linux, incidentally.
5. There was no need or demand for this.
This story reaks of one of those Top Ten lists you see in print magazines.
Can anyone offer any words of advice, encouragement, or disdain about my growing urge to throw it all away and do something programming-related in a year or two? I'm talking about the UK, here by the way, in case you can't infer that from the linguistics of my post. "go for it" is very encouraging indeed, but more words would be welcome.
Seriously, Carmony really seems like a decent guy. Listen to him, you'll see what I mean. The Slashdot smart asses usually crap all over Linspire's quality, security, morality, business model, and so on and so on, but give the guy a chance, he's not all bad.
If you've trademarked it, or just trademarked *.com, then I reckon it's got to be similar to the case of Mike Rowe Soft, which Microsoft rightly lost. But the two situations aren't equal, so who knows? Lawyer! Lawyer knows! Cue lawyer! Now!
I think it's telling that there is no information on this at all, just a load of scaremongering bullshit about my "pet" computer.
Being proactive though, one thing I'd like to see in a future version of KDE is a file scanner, like in the right-click menu and as an icon on the desktop.
One thing's for sure, the AV companies need to understand something: we're not going to pay for closed source Windowsesque AV software companies to hold our machines for ransom and squander our system resources, when security has always been such a strong point of Open Source. Someone will make a free, central, collaborative definitions/signatures database, updates will be free, we'll continue to laugh our asses off, and they'll come up with a new lie to tell about how terrible Open Source is.
I'm not referring to most of your post, just the part relevant to this particular subtopic, more specifically, "makes you want to tease him more". It's kind of true that if someone pre-emptively takes the role of victim, they are inviting someone else to take the role of bully, but your phrasing is needlessly inflammatory and you imply that it makes it the victim's fault.
/*EndPopPsychology*/
And even if they suck and we all have to wear itchy potato sacks for clothes and live in boats, at least we'll know one way or the other, right?
Does anybody apart from me completely ignore the "You can keep ALL your email!!" thing, and purge regularly anyway?
Imagine years and years of correspondence, complete with a great search system, and all you have to do to get at it is to log a few key presses.
The 99% of the time that I'm safe behind Linux isn't the high risk time anyway. The risk comes in the half a dozen times a year I'll need to check my email on a Windows box or a public machine.