For a better analogy, picture, "Hey John, I'll give you $5 if you steal Mrs. Smith's gradebook, change my grade in it, and put it back." This sounds identical to the list of crimes you made, only committed with a pencil rather than a computer. The problem here is that old lawmakers are more afraid of computers (because they don't know how they work), and thus are making equivalent crimes more severe if they involve a computer instead of a pencil.
I don't know that that is true. There are generally laws on the books in most jurisdictions that make fairly substantial penalties available against people who steal and fraudulently alter government records, especially for financial gain. So I don't think you can blame lawmakers, here at least, for being more harsh on people using computers than those using pencils.
Now ask yourself if getting paid $5 to steal Mrs. Smith's gradebook and change a grade is worth 20 years in jail.
Probably not. Then again, the least offensive act which falls within the coverage of any given criminal statute is rarely worth the maximum punishment that can be applied under that statute. The maximum penalty is the outward limit of punishment for the worst offense that falls within a particular statute and is punishable by no other law.
OpenSocial will be nothing more than a Google version of Facebook, and I'm not sure I want that, or that any significant amount of people will switch over.
OpenSocial isn't a social networking website. If Google had a version of Facebook, I would guess it would be Orkut, which is Google's social networking website. But OpenSocial is a set of technologies that several social networking websites -- including MySpace, which has more users than Facebook -- are committed to supporting.
Sorry, but in order for a social networking application to be useful, [i]lots of people have to be interested in it[/i]
(1) OpenSocial isn't an application, its a set of technologies on which applications are built; (2) Actually, you need lots of people involved in the social network, which serves as the "database" of the social networking application. They don't have to use the particular application, much less be interested in the particular set of APIs on which the application is built; and (3) Lots of people can be not interested in something (the supposed 50 million Facebook "developers") and still have lots of other people interested in it. "Lots of people aren't interested in X" does not imply the falsity of "lots of people are interested in X".
You don't need a social networking application to connect to your friends whom you sit around with in the basement playing D&D.
Certainly not while you are doing that; outside of that time, social networking functionality would be useful to just that kind of group, too.
You're not going to reconnect with old friends (which is what I use Facebook for) if none of your old friends use it.
So? What does that have to do with OpenSocial APIs? Your friends don't have to use the OpenSocial APIs, or even applications built with them, for them to be part of the network you access if you use them. You seem to be confusing social networks with social networking applications and with social networking technologies and confusing developers with users.
It's even funnier than that! It's Microsoft employees bewailing the notion that people don't follow standards!
Its not about not following standards, its about not submitting work to standards body, and specifically, about not being "open" because the technology isn't submitted to a standards body. Osanbanjo writes:
There are all sorts of forums for proposing and discussing open Web technologies including the IETF, W3C, OASIS and even ECMA. Until all of the underlying technologies in OpenSocial have been handed over to one or more of these standards bodies, this is a case of the proprietary pot calling the proprietary kettle black.
Yeah, its the new Microsoft definition of "open": "open" means "submitted to a standards body".
So, yeah, there's only a handful already committed to OpenSocial before the SPI docs are released, and most aren't household names. But they've got 200 million user accounts between them, the largest of them alone has around 100 million. Facebook has how many? 40 million or so?
And once the SPI docs are released, since "it is possible to use data from another social network", it will be possible for sites with lots of users that aren't primarily social networking sites to add social networking features and federate into massive social networks.
What is it with Slashdot headlines and the idea that "release" is an intransitive verb such that "X releases" means approximately the same thing as "X became available"?
"Release" is a transitive verb. The subject is the thing letting something out, the object is the thing let out. "Google's OpenSocial Platform Releases", no, sorry, if you say that, you need to say what it is that Google's OpenSocial platform releases. "Google Releases OpenSocial Platform", yes.
If they're serious about turning the browser into an application platform, there needs to be a multithreaded language with full DOM access, whether that is Javascript or something else. An application where the UI stalls the processing or the other way around is just not acceptable.
As soon as your multithreaded environment has shared state, you run into the possibility that what one part of the system is doing with that shared state can stall the other part of the system. Giving multiple threads full access to the DOM doesn't seem like it would reduce the possibility for the UI stalling non-UI processing or non-UI processing stalling the UI. Really, it seems more sensible to have a multithreaded environment where only one thread has access to the DOM but threads can communicate via asynchronous channels of some kind and only block waiting for eachother where logically required by the task they are doing.
Silverlight is about competing with adobe flash, which by the way is way ahead of microsoft at the moment for the robust web app space, so why did you choose to bash Microsoft and not adobe?
Because the story being discussed here isn't about Adobe lobbying a standards body in an effort to hold back adding new functionality to an open standard that could provide an alternative to closed add-on technologies like Silverlight and Flash.
If it was, people would be bashing them for trying to push the dominance of their proprietary solution by holding back standard, non-proprietary technology in the exact same way that Microsoft is being criticized here.
Microsoft wasn't criticized for having Silverlight, they were criticized for the manner in which they were perceived to be promoting Silverlight.
Mozilla, opera and other pushing to extend open web technologies?
Yes, they are.
Please.... how does a fight between what version 2 of something is named have anything to do with extending open technologies?
That's not what the dispute is over. The dispute is over whether Release 4 of ECMAScript should: 1) Include major new functionality, or 2) Include only minor new functionality, with major changes outside of the scope of the standard and left for other languages (either proprietary or part of different standards efforts.)
The first position favors substantial extensions to non-proprietary, freely-implementable standards for the web. The second does not.
Microsoft is saying we have a standard, we have products that are written to that standard, and it will be expensive to supercede that standard with a replacement.
A new version of a standard doesn't impose costs; no one is obligated to support the new version. ECMAScript Releases 1-3 won't stop working when a specification for ECMAScript Release 4 is released.
OTOH, more features in the standard means more that can be done within the scope of the standard and without non-standard, proprietary alternative technology.
They have no objections to something new, just dont break the old.
New standards, even ones that aren't backward compatible, don't break old standards. ECMAScript 3 implementations don't break just because there is an ECMAScript 4 standard.
Maybe this is a naive question, but why isn't a third-party standards organization leading the way on this?
For the most part, standards organizations don't lead all that much, they, at best, referee, and their decisions are typically preceded by just this kind of jockeying by interested parties.
Where's NIST or ANSI?
There is a reason the standardized language is called ECMAScript, and not NISTScript or ANSIScript.
However, the thought expressed by these "insophisticates" is generally true: You can generally fit weaker machines in smaller cases than more powerful machines.
Yes, the upper bound on the power of the computer that could be in a large case is greater than the upper bound on the power of a computer that could be in a smaller case.
However, using identical internal components, a larger case will generally have little to no effect on computer quality*, so using a larger case to suggest greater power can be a deceptive marketing tactic (the same thing was done with computer software packaging back when more polished software came with more complete manuals, etc. -- software that was just a couple of disks with an install card would be sold in a box big enough to hold that plus a 500 page manual, to suggest that it was a more complete package.) It's particularly perversely deceptive when the machine is marketed as being particularly "green".
That's why there's still a market for the freaking huge Lian Li cases for power users... because some powerful gaming machines require freaking huge cases.
Yes, very powerful machines require big cases. But a big case doesn't make the components in a low-power machine more powerful.
And it's why the Mac Mini is in a small case while a Mac Pro is in a big one.
Yes, but this is like a Mac Mini in a Mac Pro case.
*there are certainly situations where it may matter, such as if the smaller case restricts cooling, or prevents standard-sized expansion cards, drives, or other in-case accessories from being added.
Yeah, it's completely impossible that they received their computers, were dissatisfied with Linux because it wasn't what they were used to
An education system that had spent years testing the OLPC XO and also trialed the Classmate with Mandriva before selecting the latter? That explanation seems...highly unlikely.
Was the point of OLPC to provide low cost computers to needy children or to promote Mandriva/OSS ??
Neither, the point of OLPC was to provide hardware, software, and content support for a particular model of education around which the XO's hardware and software and associated content have been developed. Openness, in the OSS sense, supports both flexibility for the user of the system and the model of education that the OLPC is centered around (though it is neither strictly necessary to nor sufficient for that model.)
The Classmates with Mandriva that Nigeria purchased were not from OLPC, and arguably are less well suited to that model (perhaps because Nigeria had a different educational model in mind), and switching them to Windows makes them even less suited to the model the OLPC project is centered around. OTOH, if it doesn't work out, it will be cheaper to replace Mandriva -- and possibly even a build of the OLPC software stack with slight customization to address the different hardware -- than to replace the laptops with new laptops, though it would be a major headache.
If the Nigerian Government says "thanks for the computers, but we'd like to make our own choice as to what software to run on them" then how is that bad ? The kids still get their laptops and all the supposed benefits they were to deliver.
The "supposed benefits" OLPC laptops are intended to deliver are not entirely independent of the software, as you suggest here. However, the OLPC project and laptops aren't more than tangentially relevant to this discussion anyway.
Is Mandriva suggesting that the entire point of the OLPC project was to force children to use their software to the exclusion of all else ?
The Mandriva sale has nothing to do with the OLPC project. The OLPC laptops are not Classmates, and they aren't sold with Mandriva, but with a customized version of Fedora with Sugar. The letter from Mandriva might suggest that the entire point of the Mandriva effort in Nigeria was to promote their software and increase its exposure, which would make sense. It might also be the point of the letter to draw attention to possible corruption in the government of Nigeria.
Here's a neat trick, take the "open letter to Steve Ballmer" and swap any references to Mandriva to Microsoft and vice versa. Now we have a nasty letter from M$ complaining that Nigeria is dumping the Windows OS on their new laptops for Linux.
And...so, what? If there is an appearance of corruption in a move such as that, whether it favors Microsoft of some competitor, why shouldn't their be a complaint?
If you find this a perfectly acceptable situation, then admit to yourself that your support for the OLPC project was not to "help the children" but to promote your own beliefs.
First, the OLPC project has little to do with this, since the Intel Classmate hardware effort and Mandriva and Microsoft's software efforts in the developing world are all alternatives to the OLPC's hardware/software stack, and none of them are part of the OLPC project.
Second, people who are interesting in helping people are always promoting their own beliefs in doing so, and often have strong beliefs about what are the best ways to help people. Those aren't competing goals as you suggest; they are goals that are always interlinked.
gOS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. I am not familiar with that license but it does have a really long name.
So is it Linux-based or not? Because if it is Linux, I suspect they are going to run into trouble distributing under a license that is not the GPL.
I said this all along: The OLPC might be okay as a giveaway in third-world countries who don't have any choice and will accept anything that might be useful technology.
The OLPC is not mainly a giveaway, anywhere. It's an enterprise device designed to meet the neds of a particular industry, i.e., national education systems in the developing world. There are some "giveaway" projects, and some investigation of one government buying them for another, but the principal focus is selling them directly to the governments that would integrate them into their national education system.
But OLPC is STUPID to compete in America with the low-end power of Wal-Mart.
OLPC, despite the cries of some (including numerous slashdotters) who would like it to, is not competing in the American retail market. Sure, there is a limited fundraising effort in direct sales in the U.S. loosely analogous to, say, a PBS pledge drive that offers a gift with a specified donation, but no effort at mass retail sale of the XO in the U.S.
Just look at how Wal-Mart has found someone to make them a cheap, under $200 PC -- and remember Wal-Mart is making cheaper PCs all the time while the OLPC ones get more expensive -- that run a real version of Linux, not a strange non-standard operating system.
The XO has not gotten more expensive. The XO ended up more expensive than it was hoped to be. There is a difference. You can't get more expensive before you have an actual price, rather than a price goal.
The operating system of the XO is an equally real version of Linux.
What OLPC ought to do is just call off their project for a year, and then go talk to the same suppliers Wal-Mart is using and buy from them.
Why? What Wal*Mart is selling is more expensive than the XO and lacks many of the key features that were identified as essential to the XO project. Why does the existence of a product that is both more expensive and doesn't meet the goals of the XO project indicate that the OLPC project should abandon the suppliers it has and the highly specialized machine that it has developed?
Free enterprise has won this battle, while Negroponte is going around telling people that companies are "pissing on" him and trying to run Windows on the OLPC.
Your comments suggest that you imagine that there is a battle between OLPC and for-profit groups to make sub-$200 PCs that meet a need in the first-world retail market. There is not. While some of the technologies advanced through the OLPC project may eventually have some effect on the first world retail market (and, indeed, the project itself may have played a role in spurring the very demand that Wal*Mart and others are now meeting in that market), the market the OLPC project is addressing and the market this Wal*Mart product is targeting are completely different markets.
There are certainly efforts by for-profit companies to fight the OLPC for the kind of large-scale sales to public educational institutions in the developing world that the OLPC is targeting, particularly from hardware and software vendors for whom large-scale adoption of the XO in education might, in the long-run, pose a threat to their present market dominance. But those are completely unrelated to this Wal*Mart product.
Most predators also won't bother to hunt if they aren't hungry -- it's a waste of energy -- they never did explain (in either the book or the movie) why the presumably well-fed dinosaurs felt the need to go to such lengths to hunt humans.
There's a couple of possibilities that immediately spring to mind: they weren't all that well-fed to start out with, either so that the savage feeding displays would be more impressive, or because they just hadn't worked out the right feeding yet; or the carnivores were (to keep the tour more convenient) packed too close together with inadequate territory, and were stressed and extra aggressive because of that.
Ever been to an aquarium and seen the pray fish in the same tank with the sharks? The sharks completely ignore them because they are well fed by their handlers.
Some sharks, sure. Great whites, not so much. (See, e.g., the last couple paragraphs here.) While certainly it is by no means certain that T-rex or other predatory dinosaurs would have the same problems with temperament, I don't think you can categorically say they wouldn't either.
Why does facebook need to be replaced by something open source? Is it offensive for them to make money?
Uh, yeah. Exactly. Which is why we need an open-source replacement for MySQL, too, since it must also be offensive that MySQL AB makes money.
Where does the idea that open source is inextricably tied to opposition to people making money come from? Certainly, that's not the reason behind IBM or Sun's open-source efforts, or lots of other companies'.
For an animal to attack you it either has to perceive you as pray or feel threatened by you. Most animals are justifiably leery of human beings and don't consider them as suitable pray under normal circumstances.
That's because, over the time that humans have been on the Earth, the animals that haven't been leery of humans have been hunted down by humans, exerting considerable selective pressure.
Dinosaurs that magically (i.e., through sufficiently-advanced technology) reappeared would not, presumably, have the benefit of that selective pressure, and presuming that they were either predators that ate things for which humans were a reasonable match to whatever senses they used for prey identification, or just suitably territorial, would probably eat or attack humans without hesitation.
Note: Posts like the parent? The reason it'll never work.
As the author of the post, I'll disagree with that.
Getting open source developers to even *care* about social networking would be a small miracle.
Hey, I think you are misreading my comment (which was just about the sweep of the description in TFS) if you think I don't care about social networking; I've been kind of idly interested in open (both in terms of "free/open source" and in terms of "freely interconnecting) frameworks for it for a while. There's lots of pieces of a solution out their (FOAF, etc.), the problem is putting the pieces together and getting everyone on the same page (and that last part applies, separately, both to users and developers, forming a sort of chicken-and-egg problem.)
While privacy advocates have been concerned about Google for the past several years, most of us are just beginning to comprehend Facebook's growing impact on who, when, what and how we connect with friends.
I don't know what "us" you are talking about, but I've realized for years that Facebook has no effect on who, when, what, and how I connect with friends, and that's unlikely to change anytime in the near future.
It was the purpose that was formulated followed by a selection of an OS which just as easily could have been BSD or even Windows if it was best-suited.
Part of the requirement had to do with licensing, so barring Microsoft releasing their OS under an open-source license, it couldn't have been Windows. Microsoft, IIRC, tried to get to be the OS supplier, and didn't start bad-mouthing the OLPC project until they were rejected based on licensing terms.
But 'open' DOESN'T mean that the XO project should have doubled the specs and cost of the OLPC so Microsoft would have an easier time porting to it.
It didn't double the specs or the cost to do that. The cost is still less than double the $100 target, and it was projected to be over that target in the early production runs even before they increased the specs to meet the needs that the countries looking into buying it had communicated. Yes, some of that was probably related to ability to run Windows, but so what? The OLPC project isn't working to advance the interests of developed-world Linux fans, its making a machine to meet the needs of real people in the real world. And if the countries aren't going to buy it if it isn't capable of being repurposed to run Windows (which, if nothing else, gives the countries more options if they buy the machine and later change their mind about the software/content provided by OLPC and its partners), then OLPC needs to make a machine that addresses that concern.
Every non-Apple hardware box that a user uses instead of Apple hardware box is much more money out of their pocket than the cost of the OS.
Er, no, its not.
If I were to purchase OS X instead of downloading Kubuntu to use on my HP desktop, that would not be money out of Apple's pocket. It would be money into Apple's pocket. And, as my wife and I are pretty certain that Vista is the last straw in our relationship, in our own purchasing, with Windows, it would make it infinitely more likely than it is now that our next hardware purchase would be Apple hardware. As it is now, we'll probably use XP as long as it is supported, and then switch to some form of Linux on commodity hardware.
Now, its true, every lost Apple hardware sale is money out of Apple's pocket. But not every sale of OS X on non-Apple hardware is a lost Apple hardware sale.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know that that is true. There are generally laws on the books in most jurisdictions that make fairly substantial penalties available against people who steal and fraudulently alter government records, especially for financial gain. So I don't think you can blame lawmakers, here at least, for being more harsh on people using computers than those using pencils.
Probably not. Then again, the least offensive act which falls within the coverage of any given criminal statute is rarely worth the maximum punishment that can be applied under that statute. The maximum penalty is the outward limit of punishment for the worst offense that falls within a particular statute and is punishable by no other law.
Also, when they are doing paid blogging about the competition, they are no longer developers, but instead marketing drones.
OpenSocial isn't a social networking website. If Google had a version of Facebook, I would guess it would be Orkut, which is Google's social networking website. But OpenSocial is a set of technologies that several social networking websites -- including MySpace, which has more users than Facebook -- are committed to supporting.
(1) OpenSocial isn't an application, its a set of technologies on which applications are built;
(2) Actually, you need lots of people involved in the social network, which serves as the "database" of the social networking application. They don't have to use the particular application, much less be interested in the particular set of APIs on which the application is built; and
(3) Lots of people can be not interested in something (the supposed 50 million Facebook "developers") and still have lots of other people interested in it. "Lots of people aren't interested in X" does not imply the falsity of "lots of people are interested in X".
Certainly not while you are doing that; outside of that time, social networking functionality would be useful to just that kind of group, too.
So? What does that have to do with OpenSocial APIs? Your friends don't have to use the OpenSocial APIs, or even applications built with them, for them to be part of the network you access if you use them. You seem to be confusing social networks with social networking applications and with social networking technologies and confusing developers with users.
Its not about not following standards, its about not submitting work to standards body, and specifically, about not being "open" because the technology isn't submitted to a standards body. Osanbanjo writes:
Yeah, its the new Microsoft definition of "open": "open" means "submitted to a standards body".
So, yeah, there's only a handful already committed to OpenSocial before the SPI docs are released, and most aren't household names. But they've got 200 million user accounts between them, the largest of them alone has around 100 million. Facebook has how many? 40 million or so?
And once the SPI docs are released, since "it is possible to use data from another social network", it will be possible for sites with lots of users that aren't primarily social networking sites to add social networking features and federate into massive social networks.
What is it with Slashdot headlines and the idea that "release" is an intransitive verb such that "X releases" means approximately the same thing as "X became available"?
"Release" is a transitive verb. The subject is the thing letting something out, the object is the thing let out. "Google's OpenSocial Platform Releases", no, sorry, if you say that, you need to say what it is that Google's OpenSocial platform releases. "Google Releases OpenSocial Platform", yes.
As soon as your multithreaded environment has shared state, you run into the possibility that what one part of the system is doing with that shared state can stall the other part of the system. Giving multiple threads full access to the DOM doesn't seem like it would reduce the possibility for the UI stalling non-UI processing or non-UI processing stalling the UI. Really, it seems more sensible to have a multithreaded environment where only one thread has access to the DOM but threads can communicate via asynchronous channels of some kind and only block waiting for eachother where logically required by the task they are doing.
Because the story being discussed here isn't about Adobe lobbying a standards body in an effort to hold back adding new functionality to an open standard that could provide an alternative to closed add-on technologies like Silverlight and Flash.
If it was, people would be bashing them for trying to push the dominance of their proprietary solution by holding back standard, non-proprietary technology in the exact same way that Microsoft is being criticized here.
Microsoft wasn't criticized for having Silverlight, they were criticized for the manner in which they were perceived to be promoting Silverlight.
Yes, they are.
That's not what the dispute is over. The dispute is over whether Release 4 of ECMAScript should:
1) Include major new functionality, or
2) Include only minor new functionality, with major changes outside of the scope of the standard and left for other languages (either proprietary or part of different standards efforts.)
The first position favors substantial extensions to non-proprietary, freely-implementable standards for the web. The second does not.
A new version of a standard doesn't impose costs; no one is obligated to support the new version. ECMAScript Releases 1-3 won't stop working when a specification for ECMAScript Release 4 is released.
OTOH, more features in the standard means more that can be done within the scope of the standard and without non-standard, proprietary alternative technology.
New standards, even ones that aren't backward compatible, don't break old standards. ECMAScript 3 implementations don't break just because there is an ECMAScript 4 standard.
For the most part, standards organizations don't lead all that much, they, at best, referee, and their decisions are typically preceded by just this kind of jockeying by interested parties.
There is a reason the standardized language is called ECMAScript, and not NISTScript or ANSIScript.
Since about as long as there have been blogs (whether or not they should is another question altogether.)
Yes, the upper bound on the power of the computer that could be in a large case is greater than the upper bound on the power of a computer that could be in a smaller case.
However, using identical internal components, a larger case will generally have little to no effect on computer quality*, so using a larger case to suggest greater power can be a deceptive marketing tactic (the same thing was done with computer software packaging back when more polished software came with more complete manuals, etc. -- software that was just a couple of disks with an install card would be sold in a box big enough to hold that plus a 500 page manual, to suggest that it was a more complete package.) It's particularly perversely deceptive when the machine is marketed as being particularly "green".
Yes, very powerful machines require big cases. But a big case doesn't make the components in a low-power machine more powerful.
Yes, but this is like a Mac Mini in a Mac Pro case.
*there are certainly situations where it may matter, such as if the smaller case restricts cooling, or prevents standard-sized expansion cards, drives, or other in-case accessories from being added.
An education system that had spent years testing the OLPC XO and also trialed the Classmate with Mandriva before selecting the latter? That explanation seems...highly unlikely.
Neither, the point of OLPC was to provide hardware, software, and content support for a particular model of education around which the XO's hardware and software and associated content have been developed. Openness, in the OSS sense, supports both flexibility for the user of the system and the model of education that the OLPC is centered around (though it is neither strictly necessary to nor sufficient for that model.)
The Classmates with Mandriva that Nigeria purchased were not from OLPC, and arguably are less well suited to that model (perhaps because Nigeria had a different educational model in mind), and switching them to Windows makes them even less suited to the model the OLPC project is centered around. OTOH, if it doesn't work out, it will be cheaper to replace Mandriva -- and possibly even a build of the OLPC software stack with slight customization to address the different hardware -- than to replace the laptops with new laptops, though it would be a major headache.
The "supposed benefits" OLPC laptops are intended to deliver are not entirely independent of the software, as you suggest here. However, the OLPC project and laptops aren't more than tangentially relevant to this discussion anyway.
The Mandriva sale has nothing to do with the OLPC project. The OLPC laptops are not Classmates, and they aren't sold with Mandriva, but with a customized version of Fedora with Sugar. The letter from Mandriva might suggest that the entire point of the Mandriva effort in Nigeria was to promote their software and increase its exposure, which would make sense. It might also be the point of the letter to draw attention to possible corruption in the government of Nigeria.
And...so, what? If there is an appearance of corruption in a move such as that, whether it favors Microsoft of some competitor, why shouldn't their be a complaint?
First, the OLPC project has little to do with this, since the Intel Classmate hardware effort and Mandriva and Microsoft's software efforts in the developing world are all alternatives to the OLPC's hardware/software stack, and none of them are part of the OLPC project.
Second, people who are interesting in helping people are always promoting their own beliefs in doing so, and often have strong beliefs about what are the best ways to help people. Those aren't competing goals as you suggest; they are goals that are always interlinked.
So is it Linux-based or not? Because if it is Linux, I suspect they are going to run into trouble distributing under a license that is not the GPL.
The OLPC is not mainly a giveaway, anywhere. It's an enterprise device designed to meet the neds of a particular industry, i.e., national education systems in the developing world. There are some "giveaway" projects, and some investigation of one government buying them for another, but the principal focus is selling them directly to the governments that would integrate them into their national education system.
OLPC, despite the cries of some (including numerous slashdotters) who would like it to, is not competing in the American retail market. Sure, there is a limited fundraising effort in direct sales in the U.S. loosely analogous to, say, a PBS pledge drive that offers a gift with a specified donation, but no effort at mass retail sale of the XO in the U.S.
The XO has not gotten more expensive. The XO ended up more expensive than it was hoped to be. There is a difference. You can't get more expensive before you have an actual price, rather than a price goal.
The operating system of the XO is an equally real version of Linux.
Why? What Wal*Mart is selling is more expensive than the XO and lacks many of the key features that were identified as essential to the XO project. Why does the existence of a product that is both more expensive and doesn't meet the goals of the XO project indicate that the OLPC project should abandon the suppliers it has and the highly specialized machine that it has developed?
Your comments suggest that you imagine that there is a battle between OLPC and for-profit groups to make sub-$200 PCs that meet a need in the first-world retail market. There is not. While some of the technologies advanced through the OLPC project may eventually have some effect on the first world retail market (and, indeed, the project itself may have played a role in spurring the very demand that Wal*Mart and others are now meeting in that market), the market the OLPC project is addressing and the market this Wal*Mart product is targeting are completely different markets.
There are certainly efforts by for-profit companies to fight the OLPC for the kind of large-scale sales to public educational institutions in the developing world that the OLPC is targeting, particularly from hardware and software vendors for whom large-scale adoption of the XO in education might, in the long-run, pose a threat to their present market dominance. But those are completely unrelated to this Wal*Mart product.
There's a couple of possibilities that immediately spring to mind: they weren't all that well-fed to start out with, either so that the savage feeding displays would be more impressive, or because they just hadn't worked out the right feeding yet; or the carnivores were (to keep the tour more convenient) packed too close together with inadequate territory, and were stressed and extra aggressive because of that.
Some sharks, sure. Great whites, not so much. (See, e.g., the last couple paragraphs here.) While certainly it is by no means certain that T-rex or other predatory dinosaurs would have the same problems with temperament, I don't think you can categorically say they wouldn't either.
Uh, yeah. Exactly. Which is why we need an open-source replacement for MySQL, too, since it must also be offensive that MySQL AB makes money.
Where does the idea that open source is inextricably tied to opposition to people making money come from? Certainly, that's not the reason behind IBM or Sun's open-source efforts, or lots of other companies'.
That's because, over the time that humans have been on the Earth, the animals that haven't been leery of humans have been hunted down by humans, exerting considerable selective pressure.
Dinosaurs that magically (i.e., through sufficiently-advanced technology) reappeared would not, presumably, have the benefit of that selective pressure, and presuming that they were either predators that ate things for which humans were a reasonable match to whatever senses they used for prey identification, or just suitably territorial, would probably eat or attack humans without hesitation.
As the author of the post, I'll disagree with that.
Hey, I think you are misreading my comment (which was just about the sweep of the description in TFS) if you think I don't care about social networking; I've been kind of idly interested in open (both in terms of "free/open source" and in terms of "freely interconnecting) frameworks for it for a while. There's lots of pieces of a solution out their (FOAF, etc.), the problem is putting the pieces together and getting everyone on the same page (and that last part applies, separately, both to users and developers, forming a sort of chicken-and-egg problem.)
I don't know what "us" you are talking about, but I've realized for years that Facebook has no effect on who, when, what, and how I connect with friends, and that's unlikely to change anytime in the near future.
What's SDB? I can't find anything about it on the AWS website... Are you think of the Simple Storage Service (S3)?
Part of the requirement had to do with licensing, so barring Microsoft releasing their OS under an open-source license, it couldn't have been Windows. Microsoft, IIRC, tried to get to be the OS supplier, and didn't start bad-mouthing the OLPC project until they were rejected based on licensing terms.
It could have been BSD, though.
It didn't double the specs or the cost to do that. The cost is still less than double the $100 target, and it was projected to be over that target in the early production runs even before they increased the specs to meet the needs that the countries looking into buying it had communicated. Yes, some of that was probably related to ability to run Windows, but so what? The OLPC project isn't working to advance the interests of developed-world Linux fans, its making a machine to meet the needs of real people in the real world. And if the countries aren't going to buy it if it isn't capable of being repurposed to run Windows (which, if nothing else, gives the countries more options if they buy the machine and later change their mind about the software/content provided by OLPC and its partners), then OLPC needs to make a machine that addresses that concern.
Er, no, its not.
If I were to purchase OS X instead of downloading Kubuntu to use on my HP desktop, that would not be money out of Apple's pocket. It would be money into Apple's pocket. And, as my wife and I are pretty certain that Vista is the last straw in our relationship, in our own purchasing, with Windows, it would make it infinitely more likely than it is now that our next hardware purchase would be Apple hardware. As it is now, we'll probably use XP as long as it is supported, and then switch to some form of Linux on commodity hardware.
Now, its true, every lost Apple hardware sale is money out of Apple's pocket. But not every sale of OS X on non-Apple hardware is a lost Apple hardware sale.