I happen to like that shy, flat, nerdy girl who sits unnoticed by everyone taking amazingly well-organized and concise notes. She's far more interesting than the rest of the lot.
And that's what I hate about this place. These kids are so elitist and lame that they refuse to give people, even those that are better than them at everything they do, the time of day. There are exceptions, of course, but, sadly, I'm finding this to be the norm.
Computers can help. Teaching someone to do science without demos and experiments sucks. When you teach English Literature, you give students good books to serve as an example. When you teach math today, you usually -- and this is unfortunate -- just use paper and pencil to drill basic concepts. This alienates a lot of people from the entire field and, from what I've seen, results in fewer people who can think critically.
A well-used computer, though, can run simulations and teach the same concepts as we teach today. The student interaction, having the student actively engaged in the learning process, has been shown numerous times to result in better learning of the material.
If give a student the tools necessary to learn something more effectively, the chances that they'll learn said something increases.
This is true, and as a moderately pleased owner of a blackberry pearl, I have to say that it's a nice phone overall. Making calls is easy and even joining them isn't too hard. It works great for my texting and e-mail needs. There are some things about it, though, that just aren't quite right. For instance, switching applications is a little slow and feels clunky. Additionally, the application for taking and viewing pictures is really slow, and it gets worse when you use a microSD card. The a/v player stuff is also just not quite there; its interface feels kinda inefficient.
So, you're right. A blackberry does do most everything the iPhone does, but from all that we've seen, I'm thinking that the iPhone just does it a little nicer. And I think that matters to consumers.
I know it would work. I do help desk-type work for a small center at Harvard where it's not uncommon for a professor to never touch a computer, though work with people who use e-mail every day. His assistant will print out the email and all related documents, leave it on his desk, wait for hand-written edits or replies, type it up, and send an e-mail back on his behalf.
With a service like this, they get high-quality printouts automatically. The only trick now is a service that will take hand-written text and doodles and make them realistically useful in e-mail. Images are huge, and OCR isn't there yet for a lot of these guys' handwriting.
OSX doesn't even let you run as root without first enabling the account, setting a password, and then logging in through the shell.
Basically, you don't just login as root automatically like you do admin on a windows box. That's a big difference.
As someone who has sneezed directly into my keyboard, I can safely tell you that every laptop i've used is more than sturdy enough to handle that. Granted, it wasn't one of those wet sneezes where it could have drooped through the little spaces between the keys, but I wouldn't have let that happen anyway.
I think your whole point is just bullshit because, really, if you think it's so easy to build one, please spare me a "oh, that's easy! all you need is x, y, z, magic powder, and good luck" explanation and show me a realistic, detailed explanation or a drawn out design of where these materials go and how much it would cost to change the manufacturing process to accommodate.
Not to start a flamewar, but why is it that every time this conversation comes up, all people can think to say is "PowerPoint is a good skill to have. Give 'em laptops." It seems it's either that or "PowerPoint?! For a 13 year old? No computers! Back to paper! Bad computers!" I'd like to thank both sides of this debate for being to wholly unimaginative and extremist, thus leaving me room to make my case.
I'd like to just make it clear that I think that computers (laptops aside because that's a conversation in itself) are misused in schools today. That is not to say that they don't have an important place, though. Instead, that they are not being used for what they're made for, which is to enable human beings to do things that they weren't able to do before, namely, tons of tedious computations (I'm counting searching into this). There is a wealth of concepts that one could teach the youth of the world that are only really enabled by computers. Teaching kids how to write and understand a basic logo or python program alone covers all sorts of concepts, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
There are many other important computational and mathematical concepts that are impractical or impossible to teach without the use of a computer. Take Wolfram's NKS, for example: Couldn't it prove interesting to have kids work through some of the exercises and discussed them both abstractly and how they could be used to represent real phenomenon in the world they live in?
Not only is this useful for teaching kids what computers are really good at, if done properly, it could spark an honest curiosity in kids about how to better use their machines at home. I know I'm sounding idealistic here, but the reality is that even if only 2% of the kids you show this to go on to be great programmers, designers, thinkers, or anything where exposure to and the freedom to explore advanced computational ideas (many of which don't take a BS to understand) expanded the way they saw the world, you have already made the world a brighter place.
Because this is starting to get long, I'm going to save my points on why kids should feel ownership over their machine for another time. I would like to note, though, that of all of the activities mentioned here can be done on the CM-1. If you really need a machine more powerful than that to teach, My bet's you're using bloatware.
Are you arguing that children don't need exposure to computational ideas or are you just pointing out the counter-argument?
If you're arguing that children don't need exposure to computational ideas at an early age, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on why, as I am of the belief that when it comes to ways of thinking about the world and approaching problems, granted students have the intellectual capability, the sooner the better for the students to be exposed to the ideas. The main reason being simply that having multiple perspectives and tools at the learner/problem solver's displosal when presented with a problem gives him a much greater ability to tackle it.
First, let's assume that the laptop really offers nothing in terms of helping kids program or learn anything that they couldn't before. While I don't believe this is true, I'll grant you that for the sake of argument.
This being the case, you can think of the laptop as a dynamic textbook and nothing more. Over time, with most of the material that children need to learn available online for free, you've saved money on textbook purchases. They can work the same way as textbooks always have in education where the teacher says "read bla bla bla and come back to me and we'll talk about it." Is that really such a bad thing considering the possible other benefits of the system?
But what are the other benefits of the system? People say that it'll enable kids to do new things like program and whatnot. Others say that they'll draw ascii porn, share it, and jerk off all day. I think, though, that while some of these kids will likely be exchanging porn or other equally uninspiring material, there will be many who will actually use them for do something really interesting.
And about your comment about how the kids who would actually do something useful probably have a computer already anyway, I think is simply false. I like to think of this whole process as bootstrapping. They're investing in the intellectual capital of their youth and hoping that something good comes of it. In all likelihood, there will at least be one or two hundred people who really benefitted and end up contributing back into their communities to get more and more people motivated and capable to contribute and compete in the global information economy.
These things don't happen over night. I don't think you're giving these people enough credit.
Interestingly enough, in Cambridge at least, if you leave your car parked in a 1-hour zone for over three hours, you could walk away with over three tickets. I haven't looked into the technicalities of this, but it seems that they ticket you for each violation of the 1-hour limit on the spot.
These things do not come for free. As the grandparent said, these involve investments from external companies and governments.
How would you suggest that a people bring "Democracy, Education, [and] Rule of Law" to their country without some existing infrastructure to support these things and without outside investment that could be put towards providing the infrastructure?
Microsoft doesn't need to innovate. They're large enough now that all they have to do, is sit around and wait for other nibler companies to innovate and either copy them or buy them up.
MS is kind of like religions in this way. They act as a sort of barrier between ideas (features for ms) and the whole world. Some really great ideas make it through religions after some sort of central person or group decides that its subscribers are ready for this kind of idea and then the idea gets endorsed and incorperated and spreads to millions upon millions of people worldwide.
This isn't to say that I like MS's position in the marketplace, nor their implementation of... well, anything, but I think it's worth noting that Microsoft doesn't need to innovate anymore, and on top of that, that it has never really innovated in the past either.
Just a thought.
As someone who uses a tablet pc, I have to say that they kind of suck.
I don't think that the technology is developed and refined enough for it to be worth Apple's while to release one. When I use my Thinkpad x41 in tablet mode, it just doesn't "feel" right. The tracking isn't perfect, the response isn't great, and it doesn't really feel like a pen and paper yet.
Granted, maybe not everyone is looking for pen and paper feel, but when I bought the thing, I imagined myself taking notes with it on the go without having the use the keyboard. I also imagined being able to make little doodle-sketches and save them the way I can with pen and paper. As I said, though, it just doesn't feel right.
Maybe in a few years, the tech will be there, but until then, I'm not gonna want to use it.
You know, as someone who knows the media lab relatively well and has worked there for quite some time,, I have to say that when most "hardcore" geeks come into the place, they just don't get it.
The Media Lab was never really about "whoa, let's make this hot new cutting edge technology that will knock the socks off of everyone for the sake of making cutting edge technology." I have found that more often than not, while a good bit of the technology that the media lab uses can be bought online, what really makes the Media Lab special is the community and the professors who know what trends to look out for. Many of the professors there are forward-thinking and while it may look like their research is totally bogus, there is actually some idea in there that is interesting to someone, perhaps a sponsor?
That brings me to my next point. While the Media Lab is attached the MIT, it gets nearly no money from MIT. The bulk of the money that the Media Lab makes is from sponsors. Sponsors pay the lab for rights the IP of the various research groups. As Negroponte has pitched to perspective sponsors time and time again, the Media Lab is about "messing up" in the most interesting and thought-provoking ways. My point in all of this is that because the Media Lab relies on sponsors, a good portion of the projects are flashy and fun, and these are the only ones that get covered by the press, really, because your normal neighbor doesn't really care too much about sensor networks, common sense AI, economics, or nanoscale cantilevers. I mean, the list of "cool, geeky, pushing the frontier tech" goes on, but you don't really hear much about it in the press because most people on the street don't really care.
It should also be made clear that many of the groups work on things that everyone says is irrelevant now, but they will find in a lot of what they see around them in ten years. For example, the work that software agents did is essentially what you see on Amazon and Buy and all the rest for finding what things you might also be interested in. To be honest, I don't know the history of the work of the lab to go on listing everything, but I remember looking at the work from News in the Future and seeing that the stuff from there is also pretty ubiquitous.
Lastly, at some places, technology is an ends and a means in itself. At others, technology's just a means to some interesting ends. At some places, new technology is just a tool used to help implement an idea one has. I think that deserves some thought.
In short, while there is a lot of flash that comes with the projects at the media lab, two things should be remembered: a) tech isn't always the root of good research (as someone with firsthand experience, trying to make good tech the focus removes the focus from the real heart of the research), and b) sponsor-funded. Also, that at the Media Lab, many groups are more concerned about making things that people want, people will use, and things that people will find useful and cool versus just the pushing the envelope on some hot new tech frontier (we can leave that to Mitsubishi Labs and IBM, which happen to be the kinds of places that ML students go to start careers when they graduate).
Why doesn't/, get that it's a TINY TINY portion of almost every market they say they can simply do without.
In music, we have the dude who's like "DRM the hell outta my stuff? Yeah, well... I'll... not buy it! HA! and I'll tell my whole 10 friends that care that DRM is 'bad'. period." and you know what I think the RIAA, Apple, and the rest are saying? "Ouch. we lost 1. We only have the entire rest of the market left."
This dude also thinks that him and all his friends not buying a DVD or going to a theater is really gonna hurt the movie industry. Again, you're not 99% of the media-consuming public. The MPAA doesn't care about you and your nerd friends because you're a blip in the whole scheme.
Joe sixpack and his wife and kids and all of his neighbors are just gonna go to Wal*Mart, buy a DVD (rent, buy, blockbuster, walmart whatever), plop it in, watch, and that day in their boring lives will be finished. Most of society doesn't want the best; they want what's good enough. MPAA's and the RIAA's rules and ridiculousness are good enough because it doesn't inhibit most people from living their boring lives.
Now, I see your point if you think that you can convert your grandparents, all their friends, your mom and dad, their friends, your sons and daughters, and the rest of society with 'em into believing that DRM and the rest of the industries atrocities are worth getting worked up over and rendering them unable to relate to the cool new mass-produced shit everyone else is talking about. However, sadly, I don't think that all of Slashdot together could pull that off, let alone you. alone. in your valiant display of distaste for the American movie industry.
I realize this comment was a joke, but just in case you didn't know, Lego's patent ran out a little while ago (at least in America), which is why companies like those people who make "MegaBlocks" or whatever can make a cheap knock-offs with crappier plastic and whatnot and sell it for less.
I almost know I'm going to get flamed for this as this is slashdot, free software fanboy capital of the world, but with all due respect to free software, it's a pain in the ass to set up and use on a regular basis for regular people.
The whole open-source free software shebang reminds me a bit of old cars where you needed to crank the thing and make all the little adjustments and whatnot to get the car to run on a cold day. That is not a car for the masses. When you need to bring your mechanic with you for the thing to run, it's not ready for everyone. A BMW or a Ford where all you have to do is turn the key and wait for it to warm up is a car for the masses.
Credit should be given where credit is due to Microsoft for making something, which while most of it is a knockoff of something someone else did first, is usable by even the most idiotic of users. I say this because I know from working in tech support.
Ubuntu's great once it's all set up and the basic how-to of getting around is given, but if you're to leave it to someone to figure out, I've found that Windows, though not perfect, is much easier for most people to use and understand. Oh, and the list of supported hardware and software should not be forgotten.
In short, Windows isn't perfect but it's a lot more usable for a lot more people than Ubunu is.
Note: I am not a fanboy of any company. I use a mac at home and for most of my work, but use other things when the task calls for it.
It's actually like two after the OS installs.
It goes a little something like the following:
- Install OS with every package available - 3.5 hours (reasonable install that doesn't include every printer driver possible and a bunch of useless language translations is about 2.5 hours)
- Reboot 1 (1.5 minutes)
- Download/Install Updates Round 1 (Depending on connection, as little as 1.5 hours)
- Reboot 2 (1.5 minutes)
- Download/Install Updates Round 2 (Again, depending on connection, as little as 45 minutes)
- Reboot 3 (1.5 minutes)
And done with a total of about 4.8 hours after the install in total with 2 reboots.
Seeing how I just ran this procedure 4 or 5 times on a bunch of old iMac G3s, I'm pretty confident in these numbers or better for modern macs.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you mis-attributed the quote. Ben Franklin said it.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
I want to know your secret for getting any version of Acrobat running on a 2Mhz machine. :-P
Can you show me a cheaper portable terminal with all the features that would make it suitable for a kid to use it?
I happen to like that shy, flat, nerdy girl who sits unnoticed by everyone taking amazingly well-organized and concise notes. She's far more interesting than the rest of the lot.
I guess I'm weird.
And that's what I hate about this place. These kids are so elitist and lame that they refuse to give people, even those that are better than them at everything they do, the time of day. There are exceptions, of course, but, sadly, I'm finding this to be the norm.
Computers can help. Teaching someone to do science without demos and experiments sucks. When you teach English Literature, you give students good books to serve as an example. When you teach math today, you usually -- and this is unfortunate -- just use paper and pencil to drill basic concepts. This alienates a lot of people from the entire field and, from what I've seen, results in fewer people who can think critically.
A well-used computer, though, can run simulations and teach the same concepts as we teach today. The student interaction, having the student actively engaged in the learning process, has been shown numerous times to result in better learning of the material.
If give a student the tools necessary to learn something more effectively, the chances that they'll learn said something increases.
Paul Graham made an interesting point about the crappy K-12 in the US. Here's the thing he wrote: http://paulgraham.com/america.html.
It's under the 10th reason, America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers.
This is true, and as a moderately pleased owner of a blackberry pearl, I have to say that it's a nice phone overall. Making calls is easy and even joining them isn't too hard. It works great for my texting and e-mail needs. There are some things about it, though, that just aren't quite right. For instance, switching applications is a little slow and feels clunky. Additionally, the application for taking and viewing pictures is really slow, and it gets worse when you use a microSD card. The a/v player stuff is also just not quite there; its interface feels kinda inefficient.
So, you're right. A blackberry does do most everything the iPhone does, but from all that we've seen, I'm thinking that the iPhone just does it a little nicer. And I think that matters to consumers.
I know it would work. I do help desk-type work for a small center at Harvard where it's not uncommon for a professor to never touch a computer, though work with people who use e-mail every day. His assistant will print out the email and all related documents, leave it on his desk, wait for hand-written edits or replies, type it up, and send an e-mail back on his behalf.
With a service like this, they get high-quality printouts automatically. The only trick now is a service that will take hand-written text and doodles and make them realistically useful in e-mail. Images are huge, and OCR isn't there yet for a lot of these guys' handwriting.
OSX doesn't even let you run as root without first enabling the account, setting a password, and then logging in through the shell. Basically, you don't just login as root automatically like you do admin on a windows box. That's a big difference.
As someone who has sneezed directly into my keyboard, I can safely tell you that every laptop i've used is more than sturdy enough to handle that. Granted, it wasn't one of those wet sneezes where it could have drooped through the little spaces between the keys, but I wouldn't have let that happen anyway.
I think your whole point is just bullshit because, really, if you think it's so easy to build one, please spare me a "oh, that's easy! all you need is x, y, z, magic powder, and good luck" explanation and show me a realistic, detailed explanation or a drawn out design of where these materials go and how much it would cost to change the manufacturing process to accommodate.
Where's the intellectual rigor?
Jesus fuckin' christ!
Not to start a flamewar, but why is it that every time this conversation comes up, all people can think to say is "PowerPoint is a good skill to have. Give 'em laptops." It seems it's either that or "PowerPoint?! For a 13 year old? No computers! Back to paper! Bad computers!" I'd like to thank both sides of this debate for being to wholly unimaginative and extremist, thus leaving me room to make my case.
I'd like to just make it clear that I think that computers (laptops aside because that's a conversation in itself) are misused in schools today. That is not to say that they don't have an important place, though. Instead, that they are not being used for what they're made for, which is to enable human beings to do things that they weren't able to do before, namely, tons of tedious computations (I'm counting searching into this). There is a wealth of concepts that one could teach the youth of the world that are only really enabled by computers. Teaching kids how to write and understand a basic logo or python program alone covers all sorts of concepts, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
There are many other important computational and mathematical concepts that are impractical or impossible to teach without the use of a computer. Take Wolfram's NKS, for example: Couldn't it prove interesting to have kids work through some of the exercises and discussed them both abstractly and how they could be used to represent real phenomenon in the world they live in?
Not only is this useful for teaching kids what computers are really good at, if done properly, it could spark an honest curiosity in kids about how to better use their machines at home. I know I'm sounding idealistic here, but the reality is that even if only 2% of the kids you show this to go on to be great programmers, designers, thinkers, or anything where exposure to and the freedom to explore advanced computational ideas (many of which don't take a BS to understand) expanded the way they saw the world, you have already made the world a brighter place.
Because this is starting to get long, I'm going to save my points on why kids should feel ownership over their machine for another time. I would like to note, though, that of all of the activities mentioned here can be done on the CM-1. If you really need a machine more powerful than that to teach, My bet's you're using bloatware.
Are you arguing that children don't need exposure to computational ideas or are you just pointing out the counter-argument?
If you're arguing that children don't need exposure to computational ideas at an early age, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on why, as I am of the belief that when it comes to ways of thinking about the world and approaching problems, granted students have the intellectual capability, the sooner the better for the students to be exposed to the ideas. The main reason being simply that having multiple perspectives and tools at the learner/problem solver's displosal when presented with a problem gives him a much greater ability to tackle it.
I'm just curious where you stand on the issue.
First, let's assume that the laptop really offers nothing in terms of helping kids program or learn anything that they couldn't before. While I don't believe this is true, I'll grant you that for the sake of argument.
This being the case, you can think of the laptop as a dynamic textbook and nothing more. Over time, with most of the material that children need to learn available online for free, you've saved money on textbook purchases. They can work the same way as textbooks always have in education where the teacher says "read bla bla bla and come back to me and we'll talk about it." Is that really such a bad thing considering the possible other benefits of the system?
But what are the other benefits of the system? People say that it'll enable kids to do new things like program and whatnot. Others say that they'll draw ascii porn, share it, and jerk off all day. I think, though, that while some of these kids will likely be exchanging porn or other equally uninspiring material, there will be many who will actually use them for do something really interesting.
And about your comment about how the kids who would actually do something useful probably have a computer already anyway, I think is simply false. I like to think of this whole process as bootstrapping. They're investing in the intellectual capital of their youth and hoping that something good comes of it. In all likelihood, there will at least be one or two hundred people who really benefitted and end up contributing back into their communities to get more and more people motivated and capable to contribute and compete in the global information economy.
These things don't happen over night. I don't think you're giving these people enough credit.
Interestingly enough, in Cambridge at least, if you leave your car parked in a 1-hour zone for over three hours, you could walk away with over three tickets. I haven't looked into the technicalities of this, but it seems that they ticket you for each violation of the 1-hour limit on the spot.
Anyone know for sure about this?
These things do not come for free. As the grandparent said, these involve investments from external companies and governments.
How would you suggest that a people bring "Democracy, Education, [and] Rule of Law" to their country without some existing infrastructure to support these things and without outside investment that could be put towards providing the infrastructure?
Microsoft doesn't need to innovate. They're large enough now that all they have to do, is sit around and wait for other nibler companies to innovate and either copy them or buy them up. MS is kind of like religions in this way. They act as a sort of barrier between ideas (features for ms) and the whole world. Some really great ideas make it through religions after some sort of central person or group decides that its subscribers are ready for this kind of idea and then the idea gets endorsed and incorperated and spreads to millions upon millions of people worldwide. This isn't to say that I like MS's position in the marketplace, nor their implementation of... well, anything, but I think it's worth noting that Microsoft doesn't need to innovate anymore, and on top of that, that it has never really innovated in the past either. Just a thought.
As someone who uses a tablet pc, I have to say that they kind of suck. I don't think that the technology is developed and refined enough for it to be worth Apple's while to release one. When I use my Thinkpad x41 in tablet mode, it just doesn't "feel" right. The tracking isn't perfect, the response isn't great, and it doesn't really feel like a pen and paper yet. Granted, maybe not everyone is looking for pen and paper feel, but when I bought the thing, I imagined myself taking notes with it on the go without having the use the keyboard. I also imagined being able to make little doodle-sketches and save them the way I can with pen and paper. As I said, though, it just doesn't feel right. Maybe in a few years, the tech will be there, but until then, I'm not gonna want to use it.
You know, as someone who knows the media lab relatively well and has worked there for quite some time,, I have to say that when most "hardcore" geeks come into the place, they just don't get it.
The Media Lab was never really about "whoa, let's make this hot new cutting edge technology that will knock the socks off of everyone for the sake of making cutting edge technology." I have found that more often than not, while a good bit of the technology that the media lab uses can be bought online, what really makes the Media Lab special is the community and the professors who know what trends to look out for. Many of the professors there are forward-thinking and while it may look like their research is totally bogus, there is actually some idea in there that is interesting to someone, perhaps a sponsor?
That brings me to my next point. While the Media Lab is attached the MIT, it gets nearly no money from MIT. The bulk of the money that the Media Lab makes is from sponsors. Sponsors pay the lab for rights the IP of the various research groups. As Negroponte has pitched to perspective sponsors time and time again, the Media Lab is about "messing up" in the most interesting and thought-provoking ways. My point in all of this is that because the Media Lab relies on sponsors, a good portion of the projects are flashy and fun, and these are the only ones that get covered by the press, really, because your normal neighbor doesn't really care too much about sensor networks, common sense AI, economics, or nanoscale cantilevers. I mean, the list of "cool, geeky, pushing the frontier tech" goes on, but you don't really hear much about it in the press because most people on the street don't really care.
It should also be made clear that many of the groups work on things that everyone says is irrelevant now, but they will find in a lot of what they see around them in ten years. For example, the work that software agents did is essentially what you see on Amazon and Buy and all the rest for finding what things you might also be interested in. To be honest, I don't know the history of the work of the lab to go on listing everything, but I remember looking at the work from News in the Future and seeing that the stuff from there is also pretty ubiquitous.
Lastly, at some places, technology is an ends and a means in itself. At others, technology's just a means to some interesting ends. At some places, new technology is just a tool used to help implement an idea one has. I think that deserves some thought.
In short, while there is a lot of flash that comes with the projects at the media lab, two things should be remembered: a) tech isn't always the root of good research (as someone with firsthand experience, trying to make good tech the focus removes the focus from the real heart of the research), and b) sponsor-funded. Also, that at the Media Lab, many groups are more concerned about making things that people want, people will use, and things that people will find useful and cool versus just the pushing the envelope on some hot new tech frontier (we can leave that to Mitsubishi Labs and IBM, which happen to be the kinds of places that ML students go to start careers when they graduate).
This is just some food for thought.
Why doesn't /, get that it's a TINY TINY portion of almost every market they say they can simply do without.
In music, we have the dude who's like "DRM the hell outta my stuff? Yeah, well... I'll... not buy it! HA! and I'll tell my whole 10 friends that care that DRM is 'bad'. period." and you know what I think the RIAA, Apple, and the rest are saying? "Ouch. we lost 1. We only have the entire rest of the market left."
This dude also thinks that him and all his friends not buying a DVD or going to a theater is really gonna hurt the movie industry. Again, you're not 99% of the media-consuming public. The MPAA doesn't care about you and your nerd friends because you're a blip in the whole scheme.
Joe sixpack and his wife and kids and all of his neighbors are just gonna go to Wal*Mart, buy a DVD (rent, buy, blockbuster, walmart whatever), plop it in, watch, and that day in their boring lives will be finished. Most of society doesn't want the best; they want what's good enough. MPAA's and the RIAA's rules and ridiculousness are good enough because it doesn't inhibit most people from living their boring lives.
Now, I see your point if you think that you can convert your grandparents, all their friends, your mom and dad, their friends, your sons and daughters, and the rest of society with 'em into believing that DRM and the rest of the industries atrocities are worth getting worked up over and rendering them unable to relate to the cool new mass-produced shit everyone else is talking about. However, sadly, I don't think that all of Slashdot together could pull that off, let alone you. alone. in your valiant display of distaste for the American movie industry.
I realize this comment was a joke, but just in case you didn't know, Lego's patent ran out a little while ago (at least in America), which is why companies like those people who make "MegaBlocks" or whatever can make a cheap knock-offs with crappier plastic and whatnot and sell it for less.
I almost know I'm going to get flamed for this as this is slashdot, free software fanboy capital of the world, but with all due respect to free software, it's a pain in the ass to set up and use on a regular basis for regular people.
The whole open-source free software shebang reminds me a bit of old cars where you needed to crank the thing and make all the little adjustments and whatnot to get the car to run on a cold day. That is not a car for the masses. When you need to bring your mechanic with you for the thing to run, it's not ready for everyone. A BMW or a Ford where all you have to do is turn the key and wait for it to warm up is a car for the masses.
Credit should be given where credit is due to Microsoft for making something, which while most of it is a knockoff of something someone else did first, is usable by even the most idiotic of users. I say this because I know from working in tech support.
Ubuntu's great once it's all set up and the basic how-to of getting around is given, but if you're to leave it to someone to figure out, I've found that Windows, though not perfect, is much easier for most people to use and understand. Oh, and the list of supported hardware and software should not be forgotten.
In short, Windows isn't perfect but it's a lot more usable for a lot more people than Ubunu is.
Note: I am not a fanboy of any company. I use a mac at home and for most of my work, but use other things when the task calls for it.
All I have to say is that if your machine is as thick as 5 Notepads, you might want to get a new machine.
Perhaps one from this century?
It's actually like two after the OS installs. It goes a little something like the following: - Install OS with every package available - 3.5 hours (reasonable install that doesn't include every printer driver possible and a bunch of useless language translations is about 2.5 hours) - Reboot 1 (1.5 minutes) - Download/Install Updates Round 1 (Depending on connection, as little as 1.5 hours) - Reboot 2 (1.5 minutes) - Download/Install Updates Round 2 (Again, depending on connection, as little as 45 minutes) - Reboot 3 (1.5 minutes) And done with a total of about 4.8 hours after the install in total with 2 reboots. Seeing how I just ran this procedure 4 or 5 times on a bunch of old iMac G3s, I'm pretty confident in these numbers or better for modern macs.