"Management has failed when a developer has to issue a 'svn commit'". WTF? WTFF? It's way too typical: Joel knows nothing about system administration nor configuration, hence the command line is too difficult and no developer should know how to use it. Nonsense. Go tell that to the founders of Xen source or KVM. These are real startups with real money behind and, believe me Joel, these developers don't fear to issue a 'svn commit' (adapt to git/mercurial or whatever VCS they're using).
Funny thing is, he said the opposite. That developers should just issue a "svn commit", and not care about air conditioning, hardware failures etc.
But, I'll leave you to rant there, I suppose reading what you're ranting about was too much work for ya.
2. Write down few obvious statements of the companies you picked:
Apple works alone and is driven on computers and consumer electronics that are realiable, simple, and shiny.
Microsoft and Google are both a successful companies that are doing fine, and will be doing fine for a long time, if even for pure inertia and since everybody uses their products already.
etc.
3. Take said statements, and reverse and mix 'em up in totally random and unpredictable way, that seems to make no sense:
Apple to start selling beige Windows boxes, goes after Dell.
Microsoft wants to buy Google.
Google is going down any moment now.
Intel's buying Disney to have full control over the home media center.
4. Now imagine you're Hollywood screenwriter, take above statements, and try to write a high concept movie around those statements.
A real life example: snakes on a plane. How did the snakes end up on a plane? A mobster's trying to kill a witness to a murder the mobster did. Why on Earth (and HOW) put snakes on a plane versus just hire someone to shoot the guy? Because "the mobster has exhausted all other possible options".
There we go: interesting, unexpected, and totally believable, your usual Slashdot article. Enjoy!
Yeah, I have to admit, I voted this one down on the Firehose just because I don't like Sony and the article wasn't negative enough for me.
Rrright... nice letting us know... I never understood some commenters like you, who come here pull their pants down and shout out loud "hey check it out, my dick's tiny, very very tiny!"
"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing," said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. "Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."'"
He's right. I've watched plenty of sci-fi series, and people there are crazy like that. They won't blink and wear their screen as clothing! Insane I tell you.
"Who fsking cares" is exactly the right question. My parents, grandparents, and many of my peers who know very little about computers don't care what operating system they are using on a computer. To them, a computer is a computer just the same, regardless of the operating system. The bottom line for them is the costs involved. How reliable is the computer? How long will it be until another computer must be purchased? How much up-front cost is required for the initial purchase?
Let's see. I'm a casual user Joe. I buy Dell, I pick cheaper option (hey, I don't care what Ubuntu is, but it's cheaper!)
Now let's install here Need for Speed... what the hell? Nothing happens.
Ok.. well let's install the tools for my MP3 player so I sync my music.. what the hell is going on here?! It doesn't work!
Man! Ok, I hope at least Photoshop Elements that came with my camera works fine, oh SHIT?! It doesn't even start!
----
Bottom line here is: people don't care what OS they use, since they use Windows, and that's what they want. The moment they "accidentally" purchase Linux, and realize they've been ripped off, they'll never EVER pick Linux again, since it's the option that broke all their software and peripherals.
This is the big problem here. All those "loud supporters of Linux". They don't want Dell just offering Linux machines. They want Dell pushing those machines onto unsuspecting users who have no clue.
To use Linux, you *need* to have clue. And this is the way it should until it becomes (if ever) more mainstream on the desktop.
Indeed some have said that Home Basic is hopelessly crippled. But this is of course debatable.
Yea, it's hopelessly crippled. You see, it doesn't have Aero. That, somehow, cripples it. And to make it funnier, it's the same kind of people who say this, that claim that the first thing they'd do if they ever had to use Vista... is turn of Aero.
All posts resembling the pattern "why don't they fix this problem instead!?" are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored.
I've been whining, moaning, crying, and being basically a huge pain in the rear regarding Firefox for ages, because they don't implement my feature.
Which is decent performance, at least approaching somewhat, the performance of other browsers like Opera and IE. I'm sick of clicking links and seeing my actions play out like a little recorded script plenty of seconds later.
You're falling for the kind of skewed impression Sony wanted to achieve with PS3.
I'm not the "paste your post and refute line by line" kinda poster, but it just kinda lends itself to this format best so there we go:
* There are around 200k HD-DVD players in the US today. There are 2+ MILLION PS3's that play Blu-Ray, plus whatever standalone players Blu-Ray has managed to sell.
100% of the people who bought HD DVD players, bought them to play HD DVD movies. I can guarantee you that the vast, VAST majority of PS3 owners got it to play games.
How many standalone Blu-Ray players were sold out there? Let's compare those numbers for a more realistic trend.
Whether they'll buy enough Blu-Ray titles in the future to match HD DVD is yet to be seen.
* Blu-Ray discs, since the start of the year, have outsold HD-DVD discs by three to one margin (or higher).
Sony bundle the PS3 with Blu-Ray movies and put this in their sale figures. Again, notice the buyers didn't have much choice. They just got it with their PS3.
The trend in such a case may have nothing to do with current sales figures.
* Universal is the only major studio still wholly behind HD-DVD (The Weinstien Brothers have announced Hard Boiled will come on Blu-Ray, including the movie and a PS3 game).
How many studios (except Sony Pictures I presume) are only behind Blu-Ray?
* Funai, an HD-DVD backer just announced they will be selling a cheap Blu-Ray player later this year.
Anecdotal evidence alert. Also they just saw the match is kinda even so far, so it's normal they want to sell Blu-Ray players.
But they won't stop selling HD-DVD players either.
Again the Streisand effect [wikipedia.org] but with an other twist: while every lawyer by now knows about this phenomenon, they take it into account but still chose legal action is taken to prevent other people to repeat this. What they do not realize yet is that advertisers or product managers will in future even more try to use names and pictures close to successful other pictures in order to use the free publicity from a lawsuit.
Let me give you a tiny clue. From the percentage of people who waste their time reading sites like Slashdot, the ratio of males:females approaches infinity.
To be honest, I seriously doubt they actually care - popular peripherals can only increase the demand for their products. All they're doing is ensuring that there's a clear gap between them so that if some think-of-the-children types kick up a fuss then they can say 'We have nothing to do with them - look, we even tried to shut them down via lawsuit.'
This kind of publicity helps both parties, and I say more power to them if the media is running with it.
I've always admired the people who can mix and match random pieces to arrive at weird conspiracy theories. Yea, Apple did it so they can claim differentiation, and make iGasm popular, and thus the iPod! Perfect sense, it makes!
FYI most people don't sit on their computers all day long, reading the latest about lawsuits from Apple. To really differentiate, Apple has to force the offending company to differentiate itself from Apple by not imitating their branding.
As for advertisement, do you honestly think iGasm can increase the demand for iPod:P? I honestly don't get those "products". Now, I'm a guy, really, but a vibrator attached to.. an iPod? Jesus Christ. It's almost as ridiculous as the "sex organ" peripherals some jerk tried to sell for PC-s earlier this century (I know there were lots of fake ones, but there are also real ones). It's like a bad episode from LEXX.
Hey, don't sell yourself short! There's a Porsche dealership right next to the airport, and Bulgarians are widely respected as some of the craftiest virus-writers around...
I'm not sure a capital city is quite representative for the state of affairs in the rest of the country, but it was my point exactly that we're not running around naked and living in caves, either.
Our "virus writer" fame was back in the Original IBM PC days, and it was mostly the work of a single infamous virus writer who called himself the "Dark Avenger" (hey, when I was a kid this sounded cool).
Honestly, who's writing viruses nowadays (of the boot-sector and exe-infecting) kind.
Hell I bet in a few years you will see them in casual pictures along the roadsides in ditches and the people who get them find out they have very little to do with improving their lives.
OLPC and this are feel good ideas when too much of this world does have clean drinking water and adequate medicine or food for the day.
You know, just like they say "it's not the gun that kills someone, it's the shooter". It's up to the people themselves to use this *tool* to make their life better.
I'm not sure what people imagine should happen when they touch a laptop. Should be some sort of magic where sparkles form in the air and suddenly money start falling from the sky?
I was raised by a single mother, a teacher (over here teachers get even worse pay than most teachers get in other countries). When I was a kid, I had some old books for Apple II programming in Basic, that I was reading over and over, but I never actually had a computer.
I whined the hell of my mother (I was a terrible brat I admi), about how I have to have computer since it's "my destiny" and what not, the poor woman had to do miracles to save a bit of money, and take loans, so I could get my first computer.
There were no magical sparks and money falling from the sky. Would I play games all day long, it'd be all to waste. I instead taught myself development and design, and later on when the Internet started showing promise I saved some money to buy myself a dial-up modem and start looking for work, using my new skills, later got together with few guys like me to do business together.
This is an example of how a computer can change your life. It's not glossy, it's boring and casual. I'm not going to end up being the second Bill Gates, but I won't also spend my life asking for change on the street.
If the government steps up to the task to make this first step easier (i.e. getting the computer in the kids arms), so poor families won't have to take loans and do miracles to get their children one, then that's a sound investment in the coutnry's future. In the end, however, it's all coming down to the children, their parents and teachers, to utilize this properly..
After which point it must be plugged in? Kids in many if not most of the locations in which the systems will be used will not have access to an electrical outlet. I know this concept is amazing to someone who has never thought about life beyond the borders of the first world...
The ClassmatePC is utterly unsuited to use anywhere outside the rosy, warm and comfortable existence that we in the first world enjoy.
The fact OLPC is targeted at the poorest countries of the world, where a family doesn't have an electic outlet, doesn't mean that all people who do have electrical outlets need to use cranks and pedals.
Take for example the new EU member countries, Bulgaria and Romania. They're on a much lower level, financially-wise and technologically-wise, than the rest of the EU. I'm in Bulgaria.
Trust me, we don't lack electrical sockets. We even have (gasp!) ADSL that can be delivered over the old copper phone wires in any school around the country.
You're complaining how come Intel just made this laptop for the "warm and rosy" first-world countries, failing to see that A) first-world countries also need a classmate PC and B) poor country doesn't mean we run around naked in the dust and can't read/write.
All in all, I feel OLPC and Classmate PC will fill two different niches, and both are great products. Now, Negroponte much be hurt that he's not the only one making children PC, but in the long term he'll realize that the world is a large enough place for two products of this kind.
I have never come across a laptop with a good keyboard. Portability of a laptop comes at a high price. You lose a good screen, good keyboard, good video card... the list goes on. If you want an ergonomic computer, buy a desktop.
You're right, but I'm not sure why things should go further downhill. Then, some other posters mentioned we could just attach external input devices.. which is also a good point I guess (but then it's less mobile).
Intel's design for a new, ultra-thin laptop -- almost as thin as a Razr
And just like like the Razr, the keyboard is flat. And just UNlike the Razr, you'll want to type a lot on this thing, and the flat keyboard will make it a very bad experience.
I hope the other benefits of the technology (flash drive, 14 hours online battery life), carry on to "thicker" laptops.
You are going to charge me more to exercise rights I already have. Then, on top of that you are going to "manage" (i.e. restrict) those rights with this so-called "managed copy". I am sorry, but I am perfectly capable of managing my own rights. Until AACS is permanently cracked a la DeCSS, I won't be buying either Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
What's a right. It's something given to you in a law.
Of course, people believe they have some intrinsic rights they have "by default", like right of life, right of free speech and some other. But bottom line is, everyone considers those slightly different, and not to allow some people to claim "hey, it's my right to stab anyone in the back if he's pissing me of", people in a modern society basically should settle down with what is written in a law.
What's copyright? It's a law. In many countries the law has fair use exempts about using copyrighted work without permission.
What's DMCA? It's a law, yet again. It's no more a law, or less a law, than copyright is. It doesn't go in direct conflict in fair use rights, as in "whatever copyright says, well forget about it", but it goes in indirect conflict, since it so happens that when you try to use some of your fair use rights with a modern digital media, you may brake the DMCA.
Unfortunately, we don't have a third law, that says "in the case of two laws conflicting, pick the better law". Nope, we should abide by both laws, which basically means, no copies, unless they're allowed to us.
Of course, many people simply ignore the laws and make copies anyway. This is possible, since those aren't actual physical laws. You can break them, and it won't be against nature, it'll be only against society's regime, which may get the police and legal system against you, if you're unlucky, but that's very unlikely in the case of a casual copy of a DVD you use to keep the original free of scratches.
I don't know of anyone being arrested for a copy of his DVD, that he kept for himself, the worst cases we've had were when people get sued for sharing copyrighted content on a P2P network.
And charging more money about it... Well, consider this. Just like laws, the legal system your obligaions and rights, money is a virtual concept. It's really just a bunch of papers. In some cases it's even just a few flipped bits on a server. You exchange papers and get a movie that cure of a thousand of people spent working on for 2 years.
Personally, I'm just so confused because I want them BOTH to lose.
Right, that was modded insightful, how sad. So let me guess: you want both of them to lose so someone can submit it to Slashdot and we can all comment how funny it was that JACK THOMPSON or MICROSOFT lost yet another case! And that's FUNNY, cause they are STUPID and EVIL! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I really hope, no.. I *know* the court has to be at least a bit more insightful than taking all of this as a silly reality show.
Not that we need the court to tell us Jack has no case here. He's knocking on the wrong door (again). He's most likely doing this to ring up some attention to his persona and agenda.
It's near impossible to tell the difference on a CRT (19", 1280x1024, 32-bit) without zooming in.
It's expected. A CRT will blur the adjacent pixels and create a smoother images. This is also the reason why when I moved to a TFT and browsed the sites I've done, I noticed I've set the JPG compression on plenty of the images too low, which used to look good on a CRT. On TFT though.. the artifacts were painfully obvious.
Working at an Apple store, I can tell you exactly how many times I've been asked how many colors a display will show:
ZERO
And yes, I've sold to people who intend to do graphic work on their machines. This is a NON-ISSUE. Something that 99.999999% of people will never notice, unless it's called to their attention. Something that 99.999999% of people will never notice.
Thanks for jumping in to confirm the "arrogant Apple support guy" claim. So if they won't notice, let's just write millions of colors, right? I've said again and again Apple keeps getting bitten by their own marketing bs, and this just confirms it again.
I've seen lots of monitors, and I work with lots of graphics, and I'd never buy a 6-bit monitor for graphics work. Hell, half of the 8-bit TFT's use colors enhancing filters that skew colors, let alone the 6-bit.
The first thing I ask when I buy a monitor, that's colors depth and the dead pixel policy. Then I proceed to run a few test and confirm the monitor has good colors (and ALL of the colors). I really doubt I'm alone here.
Which puts me on my next point. Your stats seem off. There's 6.7 billion people on earth, if 99.999999% of them can't notice the difference, that's 67 who can. If I and some of the buddies I know (who use PC and care about colors) are subtracted, that makes, let's say, roughly 50 people.
I suppose it's those 50 people that crowded Apple's forums, and few of them started the lawsuit. My, my, how unlucky Apple has been with this story. 50 people in the world to know the difference, and all of them are pissed off Mac owners.
On my MacBook, which should have a 6-bit display, the left and right squares look quite different to me. I believe that's a good indication that the time-based "dithering" used on the MacBook is not nearly as bad as space-based dithering, at least for people who are unable to see flicker significantly above 60 Hz.
Truth be told, an image can't fit perfectly to the dithering of a monitor (the position of the image matters, color rounding etc etc.)
It's just an example that let's you see approximately what the diff might be side to side. In fact, on a poorly dithered monitor, a dithered image would look far worse, due to the interference patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
OLPC games used by pedophiles to track kids. Tell me it's not coming.
Now, not saying OLPC is at fault but... history repeats over and over it seems.
"Management has failed when a developer has to issue a 'svn commit'". WTF? WTFF? It's way too typical: Joel knows nothing about system administration nor configuration, hence the command line is too difficult and no developer should know how to use it. Nonsense. Go tell that to the founders of Xen source or KVM. These are real startups with real money behind and, believe me Joel, these developers don't fear to issue a 'svn commit' (adapt to git/mercurial or whatever VCS they're using).
Funny thing is, he said the opposite. That developers should just issue a "svn commit", and not care about air conditioning, hardware failures etc.
But, I'll leave you to rant there, I suppose reading what you're ranting about was too much work for ya.
A tutorial on how to write an article that gets Slashdotted:
1. Take one or more very very popular companies:
Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Disney, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, eBay...
2. Write down few obvious statements of the companies you picked:
Apple works alone and is driven on computers and consumer electronics that are realiable, simple, and shiny.
Microsoft and Google are both a successful companies that are doing fine, and will be doing fine for a long time, if even for pure inertia and since everybody uses their products already.
etc.
3. Take said statements, and reverse and mix 'em up in totally random and unpredictable way, that seems to make no sense:
Apple to start selling beige Windows boxes, goes after Dell.
Microsoft wants to buy Google.
Google is going down any moment now.
Intel's buying Disney to have full control over the home media center.
4. Now imagine you're Hollywood screenwriter, take above statements, and try to write a high concept movie around those statements.
A real life example: snakes on a plane.
How did the snakes end up on a plane? A mobster's trying to kill a witness to a murder the mobster did.
Why on Earth (and HOW) put snakes on a plane versus just hire someone to shoot the guy? Because "the mobster has exhausted all other possible options".
There we go: interesting, unexpected, and totally believable, your usual Slashdot article. Enjoy!
Best Regards, Cringely and Dvorak.
Yeah, I have to admit, I voted this one down on the Firehose just because I don't like Sony and the article wasn't negative enough for me.
Rrright... nice letting us know... I never understood some commenters like you, who come here pull their pants down and shout out loud "hey check it out, my dick's tiny, very very tiny!"
"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing," said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. "Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."'"
He's right. I've watched plenty of sci-fi series, and people there are crazy like that. They won't blink and wear their screen as clothing! Insane I tell you.
"Who fsking cares" is exactly the right question. My parents, grandparents, and many of my peers who know very little about computers don't care what operating system they are using on a computer. To them, a computer is a computer just the same, regardless of the operating system. The bottom line for them is the costs involved. How reliable is the computer? How long will it be until another computer must be purchased? How much up-front cost is required for the initial purchase?
Let's see. I'm a casual user Joe. I buy Dell, I pick cheaper option (hey, I don't care what Ubuntu is, but it's cheaper!)
Now let's install here Need for Speed... what the hell? Nothing happens.
Ok.. well let's install the tools for my MP3 player so I sync my music.. what the hell is going on here?! It doesn't work!
Man! Ok, I hope at least Photoshop Elements that came with my camera works fine, oh SHIT?! It doesn't even start!
----
Bottom line here is: people don't care what OS they use, since they use Windows, and that's what they want. The moment they "accidentally" purchase Linux, and realize they've been ripped off, they'll never EVER pick Linux again, since it's the option that broke all their software and peripherals.
This is the big problem here. All those "loud supporters of Linux". They don't want Dell just offering Linux machines. They want Dell pushing those machines onto unsuspecting users who have no clue.
To use Linux, you *need* to have clue. And this is the way it should until it becomes (if ever) more mainstream on the desktop.
Indeed some have said that Home Basic is hopelessly crippled. But this is of course debatable.
Yea, it's hopelessly crippled. You see, it doesn't have Aero. That, somehow, cripples it. And to make it funnier, it's the same kind of people who say this, that claim that the first thing they'd do if they ever had to use Vista... is turn of Aero.
Go figure. You can never make a troll happy.
All posts resembling the pattern "why don't they fix this problem instead!?" are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored.
I've been whining, moaning, crying, and being basically a huge pain in the rear regarding Firefox for ages, because they don't implement my feature.
Which is decent performance, at least approaching somewhat, the performance of other browsers like Opera and IE. I'm sick of clicking links and seeing my actions play out like a little recorded script plenty of seconds later.
just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project)
Yup.. based on Flash 9's script runtime engine.
You're falling for the kind of skewed impression Sony wanted to achieve with PS3.
I'm not the "paste your post and refute line by line" kinda poster, but it just kinda lends itself to this format best so there we go:
* There are around 200k HD-DVD players in the US today. There are 2+ MILLION PS3's that play Blu-Ray, plus whatever standalone players Blu-Ray has managed to sell.
100% of the people who bought HD DVD players, bought them to play HD DVD movies. I can guarantee you that the vast, VAST majority of PS3 owners got it to play games.
How many standalone Blu-Ray players were sold out there? Let's compare those numbers for a more realistic trend.
Whether they'll buy enough Blu-Ray titles in the future to match HD DVD is yet to be seen.
* Blu-Ray discs, since the start of the year, have outsold HD-DVD discs by three to one margin (or higher).
Sony bundle the PS3 with Blu-Ray movies and put this in their sale figures. Again, notice the buyers didn't have much choice. They just got it with their PS3.
The trend in such a case may have nothing to do with current sales figures.
* Universal is the only major studio still wholly behind HD-DVD (The Weinstien Brothers have announced Hard Boiled will come on Blu-Ray, including the movie and a PS3 game).
How many studios (except Sony Pictures I presume) are only behind Blu-Ray?
* Funai, an HD-DVD backer just announced they will be selling a cheap Blu-Ray player later this year.
Anecdotal evidence alert. Also they just saw the match is kinda even so far, so it's normal they want to sell Blu-Ray players.
But they won't stop selling HD-DVD players either.
Again the Streisand effect [wikipedia.org] but with an other twist: while every lawyer by now knows about this phenomenon, they take it into account but still chose legal action is taken to prevent other people to repeat this. What they do not realize yet is that advertisers or product managers will in future even more try to use names and pictures close to successful other pictures in order to use the free publicity from a lawsuit.
:P?
Let me give you a tiny clue. From the percentage of people who waste their time reading sites like Slashdot, the ratio of males:females approaches infinity.
The product is a vibrator.
Got the clue
To be honest, I seriously doubt they actually care - popular peripherals can only increase the demand for their products. All they're doing is ensuring that there's a clear gap between them so that if some think-of-the-children types kick up a fuss then they can say 'We have nothing to do with them - look, we even tried to shut them down via lawsuit.'
:P? I honestly don't get those "products". Now, I'm a guy, really, but a vibrator attached to.. an iPod? Jesus Christ. It's almost as ridiculous as the "sex organ" peripherals some jerk tried to sell for PC-s earlier this century (I know there were lots of fake ones, but there are also real ones). It's like a bad episode from LEXX.
This kind of publicity helps both parties, and I say more power to them if the media is running with it.
I've always admired the people who can mix and match random pieces to arrive at weird conspiracy theories. Yea, Apple did it so they can claim differentiation, and make iGasm popular, and thus the iPod! Perfect sense, it makes!
FYI most people don't sit on their computers all day long, reading the latest about lawsuits from Apple. To really differentiate, Apple has to force the offending company to differentiate itself from Apple by not imitating their branding.
As for advertisement, do you honestly think iGasm can increase the demand for iPod
Hey, don't sell yourself short! There's a Porsche dealership right next to the airport, and Bulgarians are widely respected as some of the craftiest virus-writers around...
I'm not sure a capital city is quite representative for the state of affairs in the rest of the country, but it was my point exactly that we're not running around naked and living in caves, either.
Our "virus writer" fame was back in the Original IBM PC days, and it was mostly the work of a single infamous virus writer who called himself the "Dark Avenger" (hey, when I was a kid this sounded cool).
Honestly, who's writing viruses nowadays (of the boot-sector and exe-infecting) kind.
Hell I bet in a few years you will see them in casual pictures along the roadsides in ditches and the people who get them find out they have very little to do with improving their lives.
OLPC and this are feel good ideas when too much of this world does have clean drinking water and adequate medicine or food for the day.
You know, just like they say "it's not the gun that kills someone, it's the shooter". It's up to the people themselves to use this *tool* to make their life better.
I'm not sure what people imagine should happen when they touch a laptop. Should be some sort of magic where sparkles form in the air and suddenly money start falling from the sky?
I was raised by a single mother, a teacher (over here teachers get even worse pay than most teachers get in other countries). When I was a kid, I had some old books for Apple II programming in Basic, that I was reading over and over, but I never actually had a computer.
I whined the hell of my mother (I was a terrible brat I admi), about how I have to have computer since it's "my destiny" and what not, the poor woman had to do miracles to save a bit of money, and take loans, so I could get my first computer.
There were no magical sparks and money falling from the sky. Would I play games all day long, it'd be all to waste. I instead taught myself development and design, and later on when the Internet started showing promise I saved some money to buy myself a dial-up modem and start looking for work, using my new skills, later got together with few guys like me to do business together.
This is an example of how a computer can change your life. It's not glossy, it's boring and casual. I'm not going to end up being the second Bill Gates, but I won't also spend my life asking for change on the street.
If the government steps up to the task to make this first step easier (i.e. getting the computer in the kids arms), so poor families won't have to take loans and do miracles to get their children one, then that's a sound investment in the coutnry's future. In the end, however, it's all coming down to the children, their parents and teachers, to utilize this properly..
After which point it must be plugged in? Kids in many if not most of the locations in which the systems will be used will not have access to an electrical outlet. I know this concept is amazing to someone who has never thought about life beyond the borders of the first world...
The ClassmatePC is utterly unsuited to use anywhere outside the rosy, warm and comfortable existence that we in the first world enjoy.
The fact OLPC is targeted at the poorest countries of the world, where a family doesn't have an electic outlet, doesn't mean that all people who do have electrical outlets need to use cranks and pedals.
Take for example the new EU member countries, Bulgaria and Romania. They're on a much lower level, financially-wise and technologically-wise, than the rest of the EU. I'm in Bulgaria.
Trust me, we don't lack electrical sockets. We even have (gasp!) ADSL that can be delivered over the old copper phone wires in any school around the country.
You're complaining how come Intel just made this laptop for the "warm and rosy" first-world countries, failing to see that A) first-world countries also need a classmate PC and B) poor country doesn't mean we run around naked in the dust and can't read/write.
All in all, I feel OLPC and Classmate PC will fill two different niches, and both are great products. Now, Negroponte much be hurt that he's not the only one making children PC, but in the long term he'll realize that the world is a large enough place for two products of this kind.
I have never come across a laptop with a good keyboard. Portability of a laptop comes at a high price. You lose a good screen, good keyboard, good video card... the list goes on. If you want an ergonomic computer, buy a desktop.
You're right, but I'm not sure why things should go further downhill. Then, some other posters mentioned we could just attach external input devices.. which is also a good point I guess (but then it's less mobile).
Intel's design for a new, ultra-thin laptop -- almost as thin as a Razr
And just like like the Razr, the keyboard is flat. And just UNlike the Razr, you'll want to type a lot on this thing, and the flat keyboard will make it a very bad experience.
I hope the other benefits of the technology (flash drive, 14 hours online battery life), carry on to "thicker" laptops.
If you'll be using an apple as an example of copyright, we won't go far.
Is raw traffic, starting at the ISP. I.e. for example charge you 5 cents per GB, or something like that.
Unfortunately this means you miss on opportunities to charge low-traffic and high-value messages, like email. Or chat, but that's life.
If they tried to tax email, people would just ignore it.
You are going to charge me more to exercise rights I already have. Then, on top of that you are going to "manage" (i.e. restrict) those rights with this so-called "managed copy". I am sorry, but I am perfectly capable of managing my own rights. Until AACS is permanently cracked a la DeCSS, I won't be buying either Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
What's a right. It's something given to you in a law.
Of course, people believe they have some intrinsic rights they have "by default", like right of life, right of free speech and some other. But bottom line is, everyone considers those slightly different, and not to allow some people to claim "hey, it's my right to stab anyone in the back if he's pissing me of", people in a modern society basically should settle down with what is written in a law.
What's copyright? It's a law. In many countries the law has fair use exempts about using copyrighted work without permission.
What's DMCA? It's a law, yet again. It's no more a law, or less a law, than copyright is. It doesn't go in direct conflict in fair use rights, as in "whatever copyright says, well forget about it", but it goes in indirect conflict, since it so happens that when you try to use some of your fair use rights with a modern digital media, you may brake the DMCA.
Unfortunately, we don't have a third law, that says "in the case of two laws conflicting, pick the better law". Nope, we should abide by both laws, which basically means, no copies, unless they're allowed to us.
Of course, many people simply ignore the laws and make copies anyway. This is possible, since those aren't actual physical laws. You can break them, and it won't be against nature, it'll be only against society's regime, which may get the police and legal system against you, if you're unlucky, but that's very unlikely in the case of a casual copy of a DVD you use to keep the original free of scratches.
I don't know of anyone being arrested for a copy of his DVD, that he kept for himself, the worst cases we've had were when people get sued for sharing copyrighted content on a P2P network.
And charging more money about it... Well, consider this. Just like laws, the legal system your obligaions and rights, money is a virtual concept. It's really just a bunch of papers. In some cases it's even just a few flipped bits on a server. You exchange papers and get a movie that cure of a thousand of people spent working on for 2 years.
Isn't society curious?
(It's a joke. Laugh)
:P
All right! Typical Linux user attitude. We need to laugh at it since it's an open source joke, not because it's funny, right.
(It's an OS. Use it.)
Now that's a joke too, but you may chose whether to laugh at it, or go sell yourself to the networks and watch some quality comedy
Personally, I'm just so confused because I want them BOTH to lose.
Right, that was modded insightful, how sad. So let me guess: you want both of them to lose so someone can submit it to Slashdot and we can all comment how funny it was that JACK THOMPSON or MICROSOFT lost yet another case! And that's FUNNY, cause they are STUPID and EVIL! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I really hope, no.. I *know* the court has to be at least a bit more insightful than taking all of this as a silly reality show.
Not that we need the court to tell us Jack has no case here. He's knocking on the wrong door (again). He's most likely doing this to ring up some attention to his persona and agenda.
It's near impossible to tell the difference on a CRT (19", 1280x1024, 32-bit) without zooming in.
It's expected. A CRT will blur the adjacent pixels and create a smoother images. This is also the reason why when I moved to a TFT and browsed the sites I've done, I noticed I've set the JPG compression on plenty of the images too low, which used to look good on a CRT. On TFT though.. the artifacts were painfully obvious.
Working at an Apple store, I can tell you exactly how many times I've been asked how many colors a display will show:
ZERO
And yes, I've sold to people who intend to do graphic work on their machines. This is a NON-ISSUE. Something that 99.999999% of people will never notice, unless it's called to their attention. Something that 99.999999% of people will never notice.
Thanks for jumping in to confirm the "arrogant Apple support guy" claim. So if they won't notice, let's just write millions of colors, right? I've said again and again Apple keeps getting bitten by their own marketing bs, and this just confirms it again.
I've seen lots of monitors, and I work with lots of graphics, and I'd never buy a 6-bit monitor for graphics work. Hell, half of the 8-bit TFT's use colors enhancing filters that skew colors, let alone the 6-bit.
The first thing I ask when I buy a monitor, that's colors depth and the dead pixel policy. Then I proceed to run a few test and confirm the monitor has good colors (and ALL of the colors). I really doubt I'm alone here.
Which puts me on my next point. Your stats seem off. There's 6.7 billion people on earth, if 99.999999% of them can't notice the difference, that's 67 who can. If I and some of the buddies I know (who use PC and care about colors) are subtracted, that makes, let's say, roughly 50 people.
I suppose it's those 50 people that crowded Apple's forums, and few of them started the lawsuit. My, my, how unlucky Apple has been with this story. 50 people in the world to know the difference, and all of them are pissed off Mac owners.
On my MacBook, which should have a 6-bit display, the left and right squares look quite different to me. I believe that's a good indication that the time-based "dithering" used on the MacBook is not nearly as bad as space-based dithering, at least for people who are unable to see flicker significantly above 60 Hz.
Truth be told, an image can't fit perfectly to the dithering of a monitor (the position of the image matters, color rounding etc etc.)
It's just an example that let's you see approximately what the diff might be side to side. In fact, on a poorly dithered monitor, a dithered image would look far worse, due to the interference patterns.