And how exactly are you going to access the data if the school is on fire?
Wirelessly, presumably.
Of course, your WAPs need to a little more sophisticated than most, and have local batteries, and be resistant to particulates (so smoke doesn't kill them easily; fire, of course, will), and the network has to extend out from the buildings a bit so it covers where your normal evac and emergency access sites would be. You then just need a portable terminal, even a PDA, that can connect to the network and gather data from whatever is still alive: its not perfect, of course, but it could be a lot better than nothing.
Of course, if the whole school has burned to the ground, its going to be useless, but one imagines the goal is to use it before that to make sure that people are rescued.
And another gem FTA... "Whatever one might say about the strength of MySQL's backers, the fact that the company is not publicly traded means the financials are not required by law to be a matter of public record."
So we're going to have to trust the software company that won't show us their code, but will show us their books instead of the company that will show us the code, but not the books?!?
In business, this often makes some sense. The purchaser doesn't want to see and maintain the code, that's not their core competency. They want to be assured that, however, the vendor they get support from will be around to provide support in the future. So they are more concerned with the financials than the code.
Its just outsourcing in its original sense (before what used to be either "overseas outsourcing" or "offshoring" became the dominant definition): focus your company on its primary mission, and contract out for everything else.
WEll, first, there's a reason you use quotes around "free market" while I don't. I'm talking about a true free market, as defined in economic terms. I think what you're referring to is something completely different -- it's the notion of "free market" as co-opted by certain interests.
Yes, I'm talking about "free market" has always been as a political ideology, since the reference was to what was or was not expected of a free market ideologue.
I lived in the Ivory Coast for a while. Kids have electricity. Computers, however, aren't at the top of the list of stuff they need.
Côte d'Ivoire isn't a launch country, either, and, even if it were, just because a country participates in the participates in the program doesn't mean that the country feels that it is the single most important project in the country.
In other words, so what?
Wireless internet? Right, just hop on the WiFi there at home, right? Right?
I'm not sure, again, what your point is there. The XO supports ad hoc mesh networking, and could of course make use of readily available wireless internet connections, but is mostly designed to get periodic updates from a school-site server, network with other XOs in the vicinity, and otherwise operate independently.
As a user of multiple computers (work, home, friend's house), I use del.icio.us and the Firefox plug-in for it, and all my bookmarks are stored in a database that I can access from any computer. That's superior to this new "improvement".
The Places system is designed (among several other objectives) to facilitate synchronizing Firefox bookmarks with remote storage systems.
1) If this is correct, disappointing that the devs called the bookmarks file places.sqlite instead of bookmarks.sqlite so people know where the bookmarks are if you want to move them. Am I correct?
Since "Places" integrates, among other things, bookmarks and history, calling it "bookmarks.sqlite" would be misleading to a certain extent; since the feature in Firefox 3.0 that combines those prior features will be known as "Places", I think "places.sqlite" would be a natural name.
2) Is this new file now no longer human readable the way bookmarks.html?
I believe SQLite files are not easily human readable, though there is a command-line query tool that lets you query them.
3) Someone please tell me how this makes my life better as a normal Firefox user?
You might want to look at the Mozilla Wiki discussion of Places as a starting point.
That is easily possible... the challenging part is who do we trust to manage such a large database of information?
Manage? Database? A large, open, meta-social-network sounds like a FOAF. Having a "database" that some central organization "manages" doesn't really seem necessary or desirable.
Sure, we could tie everything in - from SSNs, to birth records, to marriage records, driver records, passports, real estate, phone directories, mailing addresses, employment...
I don't see why you'd want to tie these kinds of official records into a social networking system, but clearly if you did, you wouldn't want it to be a centrally controlled database, you'd want a framework of access controls and interconnections so people authorized for specific information would be aware of links and other users would not; that's a bit more involved, of course.
According to the article, Knuth gave up on email in 1990. I know that as a Stanford processor he's on the cutting edge, but 1990 was way before email became something that everybody and his brother had. I suppose the term "spam" had been coined, but Canter and Siegel were still four years off. How much email could the man have gotten?
Stanford processor? Interesting typo. Anyhow, to your question...
Probably quite a bit. While "everybody and his brother" may not have had email in 1990, a rather substantial portion of the people who would have been inclined to email Donald Knuth if they had email access probably did, in fact, have email then.
So I concur with you that he just didn't want to talk to people.
I think you have it backwards: he didn't want to hear from people.
At risk of getting modded down for recommending a Microsoft product here, you might want to look into OneNote 2007 (or one of the versions of Office 2007 that include it.)
It comes with a "print to..." driver so you can print to your OneNote notebook, and provides a good framework for organizing your notes, and you don't need to kill as many trees as printing to paper.
Another possibility is to get a PDF printer; you can either just organize your notes with file system folders, or if you want something a little bit more useful to track relations between different items, you can use something like PersonalBrain to for organization.
Does not compute philosophically. You'd think a free market idealogue would be against copyrights...
I wouldn't; so-called "free market" ideology has always been about defining strong property rights, even in things which have previously not been considered individual tradable property, so that they can be commercialized and traded on the market.
"Free market" ideology has always abhorred the public domain, whether in land or otherwise, as unproductive, and sought to provide means for people to take what is the public domain by and convert it to their own property, on the theory that self-interest will make them apply it more productively than it would be applied if right to use it were not privately and exclusively held. This isn't some new developement in this century, or in the last, or even the one before that.
But we have nothing else to give. It's not that we understand our own culture, it's that we don't understand other cultures (by definition, whatever we understand as a culture would get incorporated into our own). We might not be able to introduce a western style, liberty-loving, republican government (or keep one of our own...), but we have no hope of introducing anything else.
What makes you think that the best way for the West to help improve conditions is imposing any kind of government on people (and, in fact, we do have hope of introducing something else: if you look at most of the governments the West has imposed elsewhere, they haven't been "western-style, liberty-loving, republican" governments. In fact, they've usually been fairly brutal autocracies.)
We don't have the will to do colonization, proper, Puerto Rico is evidence that we don't have the skill to, and we don't have the resources to do it writ large. But everything short of that is just a toy to soothe guilty consciences.
There are all kinds of demonstrated things that can be done that do, in fact, improve conditions that don't involve the West imposing any kind of government on anyone. So, no, I don't think this is at all correct.
But, to be fair, many African countries saw a dramatic decrease in the standard of living after the end of colonialism.
Yeah, when your country is run by a bunch of foreigners who also have most of the wealth, and they up and leave with no consideration for the future and no working on a transition, that happens.
And when decolonization was a product of war rather abandonment, the results were likewise predictably bad, wars not being good for the area they are fought in.
Though I don't know why this is a "to be fair", the failure of decolonization was largely a product of the same kind of utter disregard for the people dominated by colonization that led to the worst features of colonialism in the first place, not some counterpoint to those worst features.
So if Intel doesn't do what the OLPC program does, why would it pose any threat to the OLPC program?
Politics, mostly. The Intel machine doesn't serve the broad mission of the OLPC, but it may serve the interests of the locally (comparatively) wealthy and urban middle classes, particularly in the wealthier of the OLPC target countries, respectably. Since, unlike the XO, the Classmate probably will be available for individual purchase (Intel doesn't have a broad social mission to prioritize), that encourages those social classes to buy those machines for their own kids and oppose their government's participation in the program with broader objectives.
Though, really, I don't think the Intel ClassmatePC will, ultimately, hurt the OLPC project that much. I think it'll draw some attention in the short term, but I think the OLPC will still launch fine with its launch countries, and I think that the OLPC project will ultimately survive or fail on its own merits. Intel may succeed in slowing early adoption and more countries signing on in the next couple of years beyond the launch countries, but if the OLPC project is strong in the launch countries, others will want to follow on from the results.
If Intel is just offering the hardware and not the rest of the program, why couldn't the OLPC program adapt to use whatever hardware platform best suits their needs?
The platform that best serves the needs of the OLPC project is, surprisingly enough, the one the OLPC project designed with the needs of its mission in mind. Not the Intel one with very different design priorities. The Intel machine is absolutely unsuitable for the objectives of the OLPC project.
Well the problem in most of these places is their government. They don't have one. Or.. they do, but it's more like a conglomeration of mafia like organizations. It's a cycle, and the only way we can break it is through expensive, long-term military intervention.
Much longer than was proposed for Iraq. Something on the order of colonization, really, because they need western governance, western infrastructure, and most importantly, western culture.*
*other successful cultures and governance could be substituted, but we don't have the ability to give them anything but western, because that's what we understand.
The problem with this theory is that many of these places were places where, through long-term military intervention exactly like colonization (since that's what it was), "we" (as in the West) attempted to "give" people Western culture at the point of the gun, quite strenuously.
We may understand our culture, but, contrary what many modern imperialists seem to think, have a really good handle on "giving" it to other people in any reliable, effective way, even with decades or centuries of military occupation.
In fact, we're quite good at producing problems that way that then the proposed solution is more colonization.
But, you do know that you are using stateside costing, right? The same text that you buy here for $170, is usually provided in the third world at pennies on the dollar.
The people I've heard from in the publishing industry say that publishing houses scour the Earth, literally, to find the best printing costs, and that the printing costs are a substantial fraction of the wholesale price. Since printing and shipping aren't going to cost substantially less to get to a developing country, it seems to me you may be grossly overstating the savings for actually equivalent books. And, of course, once you've gotten the books to the port city in your developing country, you've still got to ship them out to the schools.
Part of the whole idea of the OLPC project is to simplify the logistics of that: you ship one laptop out to each student every ~5 years, and push them as many books as you want electronically. And, also, part of the OLPC project is developing Free (libre, not merely gratis) educational content, as well, further reducing the cost of "books" to the schools.
Actually they dropped the crank and replaced it with a controller kind of like a bolo or a yo-yo. you pull the two halves of the yo-yo apart (so not so much like a yo-yo) and the cord turns a flywheel turns a generator charges the OLPC. The crank was considered to be unworkable for some reason I don't understand, but there is a weight issue I guess.
The crank was, IIRC, too easy to break off. On a system intended to last at least 5 years, it was a weak spot.
This is especially important because Negroponte actively avoids having the OLPC project being active in places outside of Asia, Africa, and parts of South America.
In the real world, that's not true. For instance, Romania rejected the OLPC program, not the other way around. I'd be surprised if you could point to one concrete instance of any national ministry of education being turned away by the project.
Negroponte is hurt because when Bulgaria and Rumania start buying Classmates, along with school systems in the American Appalachia and Rust Belt states - the political agenda underlying the project will be exposed in sharp relief.
How do those government's buying ClassmatePCs say anything about the "political agenda" underlying the OLPC project?
It's always bothered me how many folks of a liberal bent (in America) will send money, doctors, and missionaries to Asia, Africa, South America, etc... As well as adopting children from those regions. Will they do so for the 'hood or for Appalachia? Many that I've talked with react with horror at the very prospect.
There's a word for that - racism.
Uh, the same races found in the "'hood" are found in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. So even if you weren't inventing false characterizations of the OLPC project to jump off on this generalization, and if there was anything real behind it, "racism" almost certainly isn't the right thing to point the finger at.
In contrast to the ClassMate, OLPC has no openings so that sand won't penetrate it. It also has a sealed keyboard so that water (read: rain) can be poured on it without damaging the laptop.
The XO is not just designed to survive rain, but immersion in up to 5 feet of water.
The requirements for the accompanying XS "classroom server" are for it to be resistant to water from above (like rain) and to be able to operate in a constant 100% humidity environment.
So. What was your expectation? 7 day continous operation?
The XO, in useful but low-power mode (backlight off, wireless disabled) as an ebook reader has shown up to 23 hours, with the backlight on over 12 hours.
If 2.5 hours is all the ClassmatePC can manage because its design has been as a general purpose PC without trying to do anything special, then, well, maybe its not all that good as an alternative for what the XO is intended to do.
I'm not sure those are the children that the OLPC/Classmate are really being aimed for. Looking at the governments that are purchasing them, while they do have some poor areas, they're not exactly sub-Saharan Africa
Of the six currently announced launch countries, three are in Africa, and two of those (Nigeria and Rwanda) are in sub-Saharan Africa.
How does competing "AGAINST a charity" hurt that charity?
In this particular case, Intel is competing against the end-user hardware platform that is the core around which the OLPC education project is built and to which its software, content, and services is customized and optimized, but is not providing competing alternatives to fulfill the mission of the OLPC project.
And that's how the ClassmatePC hurts the mission of the OLPC project.
The OLPC is getting destroyed quite publicly and there's nothing OLPC can do about it. They've been out-financed.
Today's lesson: Selling to governments without 10's of millions of dollars for bribes of all kinds (including campaign donations)doesn't happen. This is a text book case of what happens to anything innovative (read: new vendors) in government.
Is that true, though? Sure, Intel is doing a great job dominating the first world media, and certainly they are trying to undermine the OLPC launch, but are they actually succeeding?
Slashdot Mirror
Wirelessly, presumably.
Of course, your WAPs need to a little more sophisticated than most, and have local batteries, and be resistant to particulates (so smoke doesn't kill them easily; fire, of course, will), and the network has to extend out from the buildings a bit so it covers where your normal evac and emergency access sites would be. You then just need a portable terminal, even a PDA, that can connect to the network and gather data from whatever is still alive: its not perfect, of course, but it could be a lot better than nothing.
Of course, if the whole school has burned to the ground, its going to be useless, but one imagines the goal is to use it before that to make sure that people are rescued.
In business, this often makes some sense. The purchaser doesn't want to see and maintain the code, that's not their core competency. They want to be assured that, however, the vendor they get support from will be around to provide support in the future. So they are more concerned with the financials than the code.
Its just outsourcing in its original sense (before what used to be either "overseas outsourcing" or "offshoring" became the dominant definition): focus your company on its primary mission, and contract out for everything else.
Does Microsoft actually have a company policy which prohibits staff from owning an iPod such that they would need an "amnesty"?
Yes, I'm talking about "free market" has always been as a political ideology, since the reference was to what was or was not expected of a free market ideologue.
Côte d'Ivoire isn't a launch country, either, and, even if it were, just because a country participates in the participates in the program doesn't mean that the country feels that it is the single most important project in the country.
In other words, so what?
I'm not sure, again, what your point is there. The XO supports ad hoc mesh networking, and could of course make use of readily available wireless internet connections, but is mostly designed to get periodic updates from a school-site server, network with other XOs in the vicinity, and otherwise operate independently.
The Places system is designed (among several other objectives) to facilitate synchronizing Firefox bookmarks with remote storage systems.
Since "Places" integrates, among other things, bookmarks and history, calling it "bookmarks.sqlite" would be misleading to a certain extent; since the feature in Firefox 3.0 that combines those prior features will be known as "Places", I think "places.sqlite" would be a natural name.
I believe SQLite files are not easily human readable, though there is a command-line query tool that lets you query them.
You might want to look at the Mozilla Wiki discussion of Places as a starting point.
Manage? Database? A large, open, meta-social-network sounds like a FOAF. Having a "database" that some central organization "manages" doesn't really seem necessary or desirable.
I don't see why you'd want to tie these kinds of official records into a social networking system, but clearly if you did, you wouldn't want it to be a centrally controlled database, you'd want a framework of access controls and interconnections so people authorized for specific information would be aware of links and other users would not; that's a bit more involved, of course.
Details.
SQLite by itself, I imagine, won't. How much else they do with it may or may not.
Stanford processor? Interesting typo. Anyhow, to your question...
Probably quite a bit. While "everybody and his brother" may not have had email in 1990, a rather substantial portion of the people who would have been inclined to email Donald Knuth if they had email access probably did, in fact, have email then.
I think you have it backwards: he didn't want to hear from people.
At risk of getting modded down for recommending a Microsoft product here, you might want to look into OneNote 2007 (or one of the versions of Office 2007 that include it.)
It comes with a "print to..." driver so you can print to your OneNote notebook, and provides a good framework for organizing your notes, and you don't need to kill as many trees as printing to paper.
Another possibility is to get a PDF printer; you can either just organize your notes with file system folders, or if you want something a little bit more useful to track relations between different items, you can use something like PersonalBrain to for organization.
I wouldn't; so-called "free market" ideology has always been about defining strong property rights, even in things which have previously not been considered individual tradable property, so that they can be commercialized and traded on the market.
"Free market" ideology has always abhorred the public domain, whether in land or otherwise, as unproductive, and sought to provide means for people to take what is the public domain by and convert it to their own property, on the theory that self-interest will make them apply it more productively than it would be applied if right to use it were not privately and exclusively held. This isn't some new developement in this century, or in the last, or even the one before that.
Most people I've known have really liked the new interface. And I'm not talking about Microsoft fans, either. Much cleaner and more intuitive.
I'm not MS fan, but the Office 2007 UI is about the last thing I'd bash them for.
What makes you think that the best way for the West to help improve conditions is imposing any kind of government on people (and, in fact, we do have hope of introducing something else: if you look at most of the governments the West has imposed elsewhere, they haven't been "western-style, liberty-loving, republican" governments. In fact, they've usually been fairly brutal autocracies.)
There are all kinds of demonstrated things that can be done that do, in fact, improve conditions that don't involve the West imposing any kind of government on anyone. So, no, I don't think this is at all correct.
Yeah, when your country is run by a bunch of foreigners who also have most of the wealth, and they up and leave with no consideration for the future and no working on a transition, that happens.
And when decolonization was a product of war rather abandonment, the results were likewise predictably bad, wars not being good for the area they are fought in.
Though I don't know why this is a "to be fair", the failure of decolonization was largely a product of the same kind of utter disregard for the people dominated by colonization that led to the worst features of colonialism in the first place, not some counterpoint to those worst features.
Politics, mostly. The Intel machine doesn't serve the broad mission of the OLPC, but it may serve the interests of the locally (comparatively) wealthy and urban middle classes, particularly in the wealthier of the OLPC target countries, respectably. Since, unlike the XO, the Classmate probably will be available for individual purchase (Intel doesn't have a broad social mission to prioritize), that encourages those social classes to buy those machines for their own kids and oppose their government's participation in the program with broader objectives.
Though, really, I don't think the Intel ClassmatePC will, ultimately, hurt the OLPC project that much. I think it'll draw some attention in the short term, but I think the OLPC will still launch fine with its launch countries, and I think that the OLPC project will ultimately survive or fail on its own merits. Intel may succeed in slowing early adoption and more countries signing on in the next couple of years beyond the launch countries, but if the OLPC project is strong in the launch countries, others will want to follow on from the results.
The platform that best serves the needs of the OLPC project is, surprisingly enough, the one the OLPC project designed with the needs of its mission in mind. Not the Intel one with very different design priorities. The Intel machine is absolutely unsuitable for the objectives of the OLPC project.
The problem with this theory is that many of these places were places where, through long-term military intervention exactly like colonization (since that's what it was), "we" (as in the West) attempted to "give" people Western culture at the point of the gun, quite strenuously.
We may understand our culture, but, contrary what many modern imperialists seem to think, have a really good handle on "giving" it to other people in any reliable, effective way, even with decades or centuries of military occupation.
In fact, we're quite good at producing problems that way that then the proposed solution is more colonization.
The people I've heard from in the publishing industry say that publishing houses scour the Earth, literally, to find the best printing costs, and that the printing costs are a substantial fraction of the wholesale price. Since printing and shipping aren't going to cost substantially less to get to a developing country, it seems to me you may be grossly overstating the savings for actually equivalent books. And, of course, once you've gotten the books to the port city in your developing country, you've still got to ship them out to the schools.
Part of the whole idea of the OLPC project is to simplify the logistics of that: you ship one laptop out to each student every ~5 years, and push them as many books as you want electronically. And, also, part of the OLPC project is developing Free (libre, not merely gratis) educational content, as well, further reducing the cost of "books" to the schools.
The crank was, IIRC, too easy to break off. On a system intended to last at least 5 years, it was a weak spot.
In the real world, that's not true. For instance, Romania rejected the OLPC program, not the other way around. I'd be surprised if you could point to one concrete instance of any national ministry of education being turned away by the project.
How do those government's buying ClassmatePCs say anything about the "political agenda" underlying the OLPC project?
Uh, the same races found in the "'hood" are found in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. So even if you weren't inventing false characterizations of the OLPC project to jump off on this generalization, and if there was anything real behind it, "racism" almost certainly isn't the right thing to point the finger at.
The XO is not just designed to survive rain, but immersion in up to 5 feet of water.
The requirements for the accompanying XS "classroom server" are for it to be resistant to water from above (like rain) and to be able to operate in a constant 100% humidity environment.
The XO, in useful but low-power mode (backlight off, wireless disabled) as an ebook reader has shown up to 23 hours, with the backlight on over 12 hours.
If 2.5 hours is all the ClassmatePC can manage because its design has been as a general purpose PC without trying to do anything special, then, well, maybe its not all that good as an alternative for what the XO is intended to do.
Of the six currently announced launch countries, three are in Africa, and two of those (Nigeria and Rwanda) are in sub-Saharan Africa.
In this particular case, Intel is competing against the end-user hardware platform that is the core around which the OLPC education project is built and to which its software, content, and services is customized and optimized, but is not providing competing alternatives to fulfill the mission of the OLPC project.
And that's how the ClassmatePC hurts the mission of the OLPC project.
Is that true, though? Sure, Intel is doing a great job dominating the first world media, and certainly they are trying to undermine the OLPC launch, but are they actually succeeding?