The OLPCs are not going to people who are sitting on the side of a ditch oblivious of the wider IT world. They will have heard of Windows, and they will want to know why they are getting this 'second-rate' linux thingy.
IIRC, the Windows monopoly is a lot less strong in the market for "real" computers in places like Brazil, a major OLPC launch area, and the perception of Linux as "second rate" is considerably less than in the US. Further, the demonstrations have been well received by students, parents, and educators in the target markets, so I think your perception of what they will feel is, well, based on your own software biases, not any understanding of the target market.
Did you upgrade the XO just so "third party" software (OS) makers (MS) can release their software for your laptop? You dident deny it yet.
Yeah, actually, they did. They've already said the hardware upgrades were because the countries that have signed on (Libya and Uruguay among them) asked for more RAM and a faster processor to increase the useful life of the computers. It's also worth noting that while this is portrayed as a huge price increase, when the initial countries were signing on, the estimated cost of the early production machines was already up to around $150 each, not $100, and IIRC published reports had the MOU with Libya envisioning a price over $200 initially, so this isn't a "$100 laptop becomes $175". The $100 target from the beginning of the product had long since been accepted that it was going to be missed.
All it really seems to say is that OLPC staff aren't working on porting Windows, which no one, that I recall, ever claimed. The project has, however, also stated that Qanta, the company that is building the computer for the project, is working with Microsoft on Windows for the computer.
ow, there's also things I don't like so much - for instance, the distinction between "commandlets" and normal commands. (To be fair, this is largely due to the fact that most existing code in the world is written either for a traditional CLI or a GUI - so most code isn't going to know how to deal with a smart CLI anyway. But I think there are better solutions.)
Its not so much dealing with a "smart CLI"—that the interface is a command line one is irrelevant—as dealing with "returning objects to an OO platform". Programs not designed to run on on OO platform (like anything designed to run on Unix or Windows but not something like.NET or the JVM) clearly aren't going to be designed to do this since they have no such platform to return objects to. And most.NET or JVM tools aren't designed to do that, because even though Java shells and Powershell exist now, they haven't for much of the time that the platforms have existed, and aren't the usual way most programmers expect their programs to be used.
OO shells running on OO platforms will enable new ways of chaining programs together (not just from CLIs, either).
think it's kind of a drag that Microsoft may now have a better CLI than Linux - but I think that's a situation that can be changed.
Well, sure, the.NET platform has a CLI that allows you to do OO things. So does the JVM. Linux doesn't, because Linux isn't an OO platform, and while OO platforms exist that run on Linux, none is as central to the OS as.NET is becoming for Windows. OTOH, a "smart CLI" doesn't seem to get you much that an OO scripting language that supports interactive sessions combined with a conventional object serialization format would seem to enable even without an OO platform (and both have similar limitations with regard to legacy programs), so I don't know if Linux needs to have something like.NET to match PowerShell.
The whole point of Monad is that it's not just text, it's objects.
Yes, and there are Java shells that do this, too, though, IIRC, none quite as polished as Monad yet. Inherently, this kind of thing is a neat application of having an object-oriented platform. No doubt, as well as java-based ones (which already exist, though I don't think any are as polished as PowerShell yet), Unix will have.NET based OO shells running on Mono, and maybe some running on some of other OO platforms out there.
But I'm not sure how much PowerShell gets you that using an OO language with a good set of file- and system-utility libraries (like, maybe, Ruby) as a "shell" (via an interactive console session) doesn't. After all, it seems you have to use tools built into it or designed to work with it to get any advantage over a typical shell, and if you are willing to live with that kind of limitation, well, Ruby or other OO scripting languages seem to provide provide much the same thing.
Why don't people understand that the world of ISOs isn't practical for EVERYTHING?
Why, precisely, would complete (rather than minimal) official ISOs not be practical for OpenBSD? Yes, clearly, there are workarounds and alternatives of various complexities, including a fairly straightforward method to roll-your-own complete install disks, none of which indicate that complete ISOs would be impractical.
The issue isn't "everything", its OpenBSD 4.1, and I certainly don't see any reason to think that complete ISOs would not be "practical".
The Internet is like the emptiness of a vessel; and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fullness. How deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the Honoured Ancestor of all things!...
If you promise that something will happen, without knowing for sure that it will happen, that's fraud. Specifically false representation, in this case "A statement of fact with no reasonable basis to make that statement".
"Reasonable basis" isn't the same thing as "knowing for sure".
But, more importantly than legal liability (which is unlikely but possible), if they promised and then didn't deliver, that'd be worse from a PR perspective than preparing people for the possibility of no recovery and then having a full recovery of all data.
The Democrats are a far-right party by the standards of the rest of the world.
More accurately, at least by the standards of the developed West, the Democratic Party is mostly a center-right party and the Republican Party a far right party. The relatively exclusionary electoral system in the US that produces alienation and low turnouts tends to suppress participation mostly on the left (this follows the experience in most of the West, where more participation tends to pull the system to the Left more, and less pulls it to the Right) and skew the entire political spectrum to the Right; also, the US leans culturally more the Right than most of the West before that exclusion, perhaps in large part do to the degree of religiosity and particularly the uniquely strong cultural influence of Protestant Fundamentalism in the US.
That the US also has geographic distortions in its political system which tend to give more political power to regions that tend (overall) lean to more to the (for the US) Right, compared to those that lean, overall, more to the local Left combines with the other sources of distortion to produce a particularly right-leaning trend in government in the US.
Perhaps a better word choice would have been "neolib," as it imparts a relation to the term neocon without the confusion of actually using that same word.
Neoconservative and neoliberal have well-established meanings, there are Democrats who are (or have close ideological affinity with) neoconservatives, and neoliberals are, if Democrats at all, on the right, not left, fringe of the Democratic party (neoliberals and neoconservatives have broadly similar international economic views, though neoconservatives are defined more by foreign policy orientation.)
Misusing a bunch of words is not a good way to communicate clearly.
At some point of our 230 year existence, we began to evaporate the states' rights for federal ones.
First off, states don't have rights, and neither does the federal government. Governments have powers, people have rights.
The first major step in the dimunition of state power and the ascendancy of federal power was the adoption of the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation.
Really, it shouldn't be surprising that the locus of government power has moved; the radius of interactions involved in trade, travel, and daily life for most people has radically increased over the last 230 years.
(I love AT&T as the prime example of how the government has no real control. Break them up and watch a "Baby Bell" buy back the others and eventually the parent company.)
Every step in the reformation of AT&T was scrutinized, and approved by the government. Certainly that's a horrible example of government not having power (if you wanted to use it as an example of government lacking judgement, or coherent policy, or that it tends to use the power it has to favor the already rich, that might be viable. But that it doesn't have power? Sorry, doesn't work.)
Also, something needs to be done about gerrymandering.
The problem is that there is no good way to draw single-member districts, and everyone who knows anything about how the system works knows this, and so every proposal to "do something" about gerrymandering is based entirely around locking in a perceived advantage to the party proposing the "solution" by trying to make a system that sounds "fair" in outline but leverages elements that it is hoped most people won't notice to favor the proposer.
The best known voting methods use the Condorcet pairwise evaluation method, and it can be shown mathematically that those methods do an excellent job of reflecting voter will in elections.
No, it can't, because collective "voter will" is not something that has a measurable, non-controversial concrete interpretation that one can mathematically compare things to (if it did, we could simply use measuring that as a voting method, and it would be, by definition, a perfect representation of "voter will".)
While IRV (and its multiwinner form STV) is, quite arguably, bad among ranked-ballot methods because it has certain perverse results which can be eliminate in systems which are both conceptually simpler and practically simpler to implement (such as just doing IRV/STV without loser elimination), and while methods that always choose the Condorcet winner if one exists and a member of the Smith set otherwise (which don't necessarily use pairwise comparison directly) are, despite the greater practical complexity and conceptual complexity of the methods, certainly widely held to be attractive in the results, decisions among voting methods always center around controversial preferences in priority among various criteria, there is no noncontroversial "best" set of methods.
The other approach that seems to work reasonably well for empowering more parties is the proportional representation system. The downside to that is that it means you are truly voting for a party rather than for a person, and I and many other Americans prefer to vote for the man, not the party (excepting where they both suck, which is increasingly the norm).
Proportional representation methods (it is not a single system) can involve voting directly for candidates—it is not limited to party-list systems. There are plenty of candidate based, ranked ballot, proportional representation systems (one of the most popular being the multiwinner generalization of IRV, the Single Transferable Vote).
The United States has dozens if not hundreds of political parties, another one won't be third and won't make any difference. The US has had many parties for a long time, but it has always had only two national parties of significance at any given time.
If you want substantively more choices of viable parties and diversity of voices and viewpoints that are reflected in government, what you need is a change in the election systems used throughout the country; at a minimum, some system of preference voting, but even that may not change a lot if all the important elections are single-winner. Ideally, you want multiseat (which can still be, and I would say ought to be, direct, candidate-based rather than party-list) elections at least for legislative offices.
I can see these distributed to poor nations benefiting from OLPC. Include this with the PC given out to the poor and needy.
While its quite possible that something with similar content (though probably not the English-language Wikipedia) could be loaded on the OLPC, or onto school-site servers in areas using the OLPC, providing exactly this—Wikipedia on CD/DVD—would be pointless as anything but a coaster to accompany the OLPC directly, since the OLPC has no CD/DVD drive.
I parsed that as intending to mean that the Evans Data report splits the various Oracle DB offerings (Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, etc) into separate products for purposes of calculating market share.
In edition to a series of "editions" of the main Oracle Database engine product, Oracle has Oracle Berkeley DB and the TimesTen In-Memory Database, which are (certainly in the first case, and I believe also in the second) completely different systems, not just different versions of the core engine.
MySQL is dual licensed so if they add this code they can't sell their product under another license.
Presuming that Google owns all the copyrights (which I would assume they do) to their changes, nothing prevents MySQL AB from negotiating a deal with Google to include the enhancements in the commercial distribution.
If there's enough value to MySQL that they can offer enough to Google to make it worthwhile, there is no reason for it not to happen.
"A person should not be buying a dSLR if they aren't going to take the time to learn how to use it. They should just be buying a point and shoot camera. The 5MP camera, they noted that it does badly in low light and the light has a blue tinge."
This is not how they are marketed though.
Huh? The selling points I see pushed on dSLRs are not mostly being great point-and-shoot cameras, but things like capturing high-speed motion, adaptability to different light conditions, ability to accept different lenses, and compatibility with a wide range of other accessories.
It's an article that points out the fallacy of buying the most phenomenal camera out there to take pictures.
...under average conditions, without learning how to use the camera.
A lot of people out there still think you need an awesome camera even if you have a camera phone.
And lots of people still do, because they take pictures in conditions other than those that a point-and-shoot camera is good for.
Then again, there's no reason a dSLR should not be a very good point-and-shoot camera in auto mode.
Sure there is. First of all, because even in auto mode, a dSLR still isn't a point-and-shoot camera. It's still designed to adapt to a wide range of conditions automatically, not optimized for the most common conditions like a point-and-shoot.
In this case the white balance on the dDSLR is wrong, and scaling down has nothing to do with that. It would be one thing if you simply couldn't tell the difference in scaled-down images; what makes it funny is that the cell cam image looks better, hands down.
Its an apples-to-oranges comparison: the n95, as the article notes, processes the picture after its taken. Even in auto mode, dSLRs don't do that by default, and shouldn't. A dSLR isn't a "point-and-shoot-plus", its a different tool.
Still, the medium light [cnet.co.uk] photos were taken in indoor lighting, and that n95 shot looks good. Its only advantage over the real camera images is better white balance, but then again proper white balance is pretty darn important.
The site notes that the N95 does postprocessing by default that results in the color vibrance. Really, I'm not surprised that a point-and-shoot camera (that it is in a phone isn't really an issue) takes decent pictures in average conditions—that's what the point of a point-and-shoot camera is, after all— nor am I surprised that one that does some automatic postprocessing no doubt designed to make pictures taken in average conditions look better is competitive with an unprocessed image from a dSLR in similar conditions.
SLRs (digital or otherwise) selling point is that they provide the flexibility to do things far beyond snapshots in average conditions.
If you had bothered to actually check this out before making the claim, you would find that the manufacturer calls them juice drinks.
No, if I had checked that out, what I would have gotten was a page that doesn't load correctly on this machine, since it doesn't have Flash Player 8. The pages I did check listed them as "fruit drinks".
But, at any rate, a "juice drink" is not a "juice", either, so you are just underlining my point.
With any fixed number, sure, this is O(1) with respect to the number of processes.
Well, yeah, that's what I meant.
But as soon as you do something as eminently reasonable as, say, allowing floating-point priorities, or allowing the full range of a 32 or 64-bit integer as a priority, it breaks and you go back to O(log n) priority queues.
Well, using a bigger finite range of priorities doesn't stop you from using a fixed array of queues and staying O(1), though presumably the bigger the number of queues the slower your O(1) system is going to be, to the point where for large priority ranges, so your O(log n) method may be better for reasonable numbers of processes even though it ultimately scales worse with the number of processes. Of course, changes in how computers are used may change what a "reasonable number" of processes is dramatically, so what is best depends on how important it is to have a wide range of priorities, and what you're doing with the system.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the Windows monopoly is a lot less strong in the market for "real" computers in places like Brazil, a major OLPC launch area, and the perception of Linux as "second rate" is considerably less than in the US. Further, the demonstrations have been well received by students, parents, and educators in the target markets, so I think your perception of what they will feel is, well, based on your own software biases, not any understanding of the target market.
Yeah, actually, they did. They've already said the hardware upgrades were because the countries that have signed on (Libya and Uruguay among them) asked for more RAM and a faster processor to increase the useful life of the computers. It's also worth noting that while this is portrayed as a huge price increase, when the initial countries were signing on, the estimated cost of the early production machines was already up to around $150 each, not $100, and IIRC published reports had the MOU with Libya envisioning a price over $200 initially, so this isn't a "$100 laptop becomes $175". The $100 target from the beginning of the product had long since been accepted that it was going to be missed.
All it really seems to say is that OLPC staff aren't working on porting Windows, which no one, that I recall, ever claimed. The project has, however, also stated that Qanta, the company that is building the computer for the project, is working with Microsoft on Windows for the computer.
Its not so much dealing with a "smart CLI"—that the interface is a command line one is irrelevant—as dealing with "returning objects to an OO platform". Programs not designed to run on on OO platform (like anything designed to run on Unix or Windows but not something like
OO shells running on OO platforms will enable new ways of chaining programs together (not just from CLIs, either).
Well, sure, the
Yes, and there are Java shells that do this, too, though, IIRC, none quite as polished as Monad yet. Inherently, this kind of thing is a neat application of having an object-oriented platform. No doubt, as well as java-based ones (which already exist, though I don't think any are as polished as PowerShell yet), Unix will have
But I'm not sure how much PowerShell gets you that using an OO language with a good set of file- and system-utility libraries (like, maybe, Ruby) as a "shell" (via an interactive console session) doesn't. After all, it seems you have to use tools built into it or designed to work with it to get any advantage over a typical shell, and if you are willing to live with that kind of limitation, well, Ruby or other OO scripting languages seem to provide provide much the same thing.
Why, precisely, would complete (rather than minimal) official ISOs not be practical for OpenBSD? Yes, clearly, there are workarounds and alternatives of various complexities, including a fairly straightforward method to roll-your-own complete install disks, none of which indicate that complete ISOs would be impractical.
The issue isn't "everything", its OpenBSD 4.1, and I certainly don't see any reason to think that complete ISOs would not be "practical".
Linux available pre-loaded? Many Slashdotters happy.
Manufacturers find a lever against MS to cut the MS "tax"? Many Slashdotters (many of the same slashdotters, even) happy.
Win-win, it seems to me.
The Internet is like the emptiness of a vessel; and in our ...
employment of it we must be on our guard against all fullness. How
deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the Honoured Ancestor of
all things!
Then again, I may be confusing it with the Tao.
"Reasonable basis" isn't the same thing as "knowing for sure".
But, more importantly than legal liability (which is unlikely but possible), if they promised and then didn't deliver, that'd be worse from a PR perspective than preparing people for the possibility of no recovery and then having a full recovery of all data.
Its also the right and honest thing to do.
More accurately, at least by the standards of the developed West, the Democratic Party is mostly a center-right party and the Republican Party a far right party. The relatively exclusionary electoral system in the US that produces alienation and low turnouts tends to suppress participation mostly on the left (this follows the experience in most of the West, where more participation tends to pull the system to the Left more, and less pulls it to the Right) and skew the entire political spectrum to the Right; also, the US leans culturally more the Right than most of the West before that exclusion, perhaps in large part do to the degree of religiosity and particularly the uniquely strong cultural influence of Protestant Fundamentalism in the US.
That the US also has geographic distortions in its political system which tend to give more political power to regions that tend (overall) lean to more to the (for the US) Right, compared to those that lean, overall, more to the local Left combines with the other sources of distortion to produce a particularly right-leaning trend in government in the US.
First off, states don't have rights, and neither does the federal government. Governments have powers, people have rights.
The first major step in the dimunition of state power and the ascendancy of federal power was the adoption of the Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation.
Really, it shouldn't be surprising that the locus of government power has moved; the radius of interactions involved in trade, travel, and daily life for most people has radically increased over the last 230 years.
Every step in the reformation of AT&T was scrutinized, and approved by the government. Certainly that's a horrible example of government not having power (if you wanted to use it as an example of government lacking judgement, or coherent policy, or that it tends to use the power it has to favor the already rich, that might be viable. But that it doesn't have power? Sorry, doesn't work.)
The problem is that there is no good way to draw single-member districts, and everyone who knows anything about how the system works knows this, and so every proposal to "do something" about gerrymandering is based entirely around locking in a perceived advantage to the party proposing the "solution" by trying to make a system that sounds "fair" in outline but leverages elements that it is hoped most people won't notice to favor the proposer.
No, it can't, because collective "voter will" is not something that has a measurable, non-controversial concrete interpretation that one can mathematically compare things to (if it did, we could simply use measuring that as a voting method, and it would be, by definition, a perfect representation of "voter will".)
While IRV (and its multiwinner form STV) is, quite arguably, bad among ranked-ballot methods because it has certain perverse results which can be eliminate in systems which are both conceptually simpler and practically simpler to implement (such as just doing IRV/STV without loser elimination), and while methods that always choose the Condorcet winner if one exists and a member of the Smith set otherwise (which don't necessarily use pairwise comparison directly) are, despite the greater practical complexity and conceptual complexity of the methods, certainly widely held to be attractive in the results, decisions among voting methods always center around controversial preferences in priority among various criteria, there is no noncontroversial "best" set of methods.
Proportional representation methods (it is not a single system) can involve voting directly for candidates—it is not limited to party-list systems. There are plenty of candidate based, ranked ballot, proportional representation systems (one of the most popular being the multiwinner generalization of IRV, the Single Transferable Vote).
The United States has dozens if not hundreds of political parties, another one won't be third and won't make any difference. The US has had many parties for a long time, but it has always had only two national parties of significance at any given time.
If you want substantively more choices of viable parties and diversity of voices and viewpoints that are reflected in government, what you need is a change in the election systems used throughout the country; at a minimum, some system of preference voting, but even that may not change a lot if all the important elections are single-winner. Ideally, you want multiseat (which can still be, and I would say ought to be, direct, candidate-based rather than party-list) elections at least for legislative offices.
An IPO doesn't need to mean the existing core loses control: Google demonstrated that quite well I think.
That big 0 major version number of the release might relate to that.
While its quite possible that something with similar content (though probably not the English-language Wikipedia) could be loaded on the OLPC, or onto school-site servers in areas using the OLPC, providing exactly this—Wikipedia on CD/DVD—would be pointless as anything but a coaster to accompany the OLPC directly, since the OLPC has no CD/DVD drive.
In edition to a series of "editions" of the main Oracle Database engine product, Oracle has Oracle Berkeley DB and the TimesTen In-Memory Database, which are (certainly in the first case, and I believe also in the second) completely different systems, not just different versions of the core engine.
Presuming that Google owns all the copyrights (which I would assume they do) to their changes, nothing prevents MySQL AB from negotiating a deal with Google to include the enhancements in the commercial distribution.
If there's enough value to MySQL that they can offer enough to Google to make it worthwhile, there is no reason for it not to happen.
Huh? The selling points I see pushed on dSLRs are not mostly being great point-and-shoot cameras, but things like capturing high-speed motion, adaptability to different light conditions, ability to accept different lenses, and compatibility with a wide range of other accessories.
And lots of people still do, because they take pictures in conditions other than those that a point-and-shoot camera is good for.
Sure there is. First of all, because even in auto mode, a dSLR still isn't a point-and-shoot camera. It's still designed to adapt to a wide range of conditions automatically, not optimized for the most common conditions like a point-and-shoot.
Its an apples-to-oranges comparison: the n95, as the article notes, processes the picture after its taken. Even in auto mode, dSLRs don't do that by default, and shouldn't. A dSLR isn't a "point-and-shoot-plus", its a different tool.
The site notes that the N95 does postprocessing by default that results in the color vibrance. Really, I'm not surprised that a point-and-shoot camera (that it is in a phone isn't really an issue) takes decent pictures in average conditions—that's what the point of a point-and-shoot camera is, after all— nor am I surprised that one that does some automatic postprocessing no doubt designed to make pictures taken in average conditions look better is competitive with an unprocessed image from a dSLR in similar conditions.
SLRs (digital or otherwise) selling point is that they provide the flexibility to do things far beyond snapshots in average conditions.
No, if I had checked that out, what I would have gotten was a page that doesn't load correctly on this machine, since it doesn't have Flash Player 8. The pages I did check listed them as "fruit drinks".
But, at any rate, a "juice drink" is not a "juice", either, so you are just underlining my point.
Well, yeah, that's what I meant.
Well, using a bigger finite range of priorities doesn't stop you from using a fixed array of queues and staying O(1), though presumably the bigger the number of queues the slower your O(1) system is going to be, to the point where for large priority ranges, so your O(log n) method may be better for reasonable numbers of processes even though it ultimately scales worse with the number of processes. Of course, changes in how computers are used may change what a "reasonable number" of processes is dramatically, so what is best depends on how important it is to have a wide range of priorities, and what you're doing with the system.