How can the monitor possibly not be an issue? Even with all the latest "high resolution" screens and sub-pixel anti-aliasing in font rendering, ultimately the screens on desktops today are around 100dpi, while the sorts of printers where things like TeX output look nice are more like 600dpi as a minimum.
Because at screen resolutions, many fonts designed for math use make the relevant symbols quite clearly distinguishable. Sure, they "look nice" at higher resolutions. That's not the issue.
100% true - But they should have the balls to come out and say so, not hide behind a totally unrelated law that even the experts disagree on its exactly implications.
The fact that experts disagree on its exact implications means that there is a huge nebulous grey area where it is quite conceivable that their counsel advised them to avoid stepping in because, whether it was clearly required or not, it created substantial risk of liability which could be avoided. Particularly when regulators are presently taking a microscope to Apple over compliance with accounting rules, an excess of caution isn't really surprising at all.
The way to avoid things like this is to write laws that are clear enough that there are not large areas where experts disagree on what the law means.
Fortress looks decent but wholly pointless. Numerical code these days has to co-exist with large C and C++ libraries and integrated into general purpose applications. Maybe a Fortress-to-JVM and Fortress-to-CLR compiler would be useful...
The FAQ notes that their initial implementation target is the JVM.
When DARPA is handing out grant money, people tend to make an effort, even where others have failed in the past. That being said, its somewhat interesting that of the languages developed for this DARPA program, the IBM entry (X10) extends Java.
And most keyboards will pitifully fail to type, in any straightforward and reliable way.
Fortress is not, from the description, a "programming language for the masses", but rather one designed for a specialized scientific user-base.
So, it requires either a special keyboard or special input method to use effectively. So what?
And most monitors will fail to display unambiguously, in any straightforward and reliable way.
The monitor is not the issue, the font is. OTOH, specialized fonts that make the distinctions necessary for unambiguously representing complex mathematical notation are hardly unknown, particularly among the target user base of Fortress.
Programming should be based on mathematics, not written in it
That's a nice theory, and maybe that's the best way for some programming. Maybe its not the best way for others.
Seriously, if TeX is the least friendly programming environment I have ever encountered in serious use, and the average programming font has trouble distinguishing (,
So long as you are doing it with TeX as your programming environment, and using the average programming font, your logic here is sound.
OTOH, I expect that Fortress environments will not be TeX environments (at least not typical ones), nor will they prefer the use of "the average programming font", whatever that is.
So they're going to include, what, a LaTeX implementation so programmers can make their symbols look right?
I suspect that, as the characters are Unicode as noted in the same FAQ entry as the syntax example PDF, more traditional editing environments will work, though special keyboards or at least keymappings may become a necessity for using it. Given, though, the orientation of the language, that's perhaps a sane approach. Learning how to do the entry for it may be less of a barrier than learning an entirely new vocabularly and its mapping to standard mathematical expressions.
would be silly for the government not to exercise that same power against potential terrorists...
When you hear "potential terrorists" you should recognize that it means "everybody", since until they've checked you out, they don't know that you aren't a terrorist, and until they know that, you remain a "potential terrorist".
A government can arrest you, imprison you, and even kill you. Governments all around the world are waging wars, rounding people up, and torturing them. What business can do that?
Well, a few probably could, but its cheaper (and provides a some distance which is useful for PR purposes) for them to pay governments (or, more often, just a handful of individual government officials who can steer government policy) to do it for them.
A quick look says that newegg has 500 gig drives for $144. If each movie is 20 gigs, then you'd need 4 of those drives to store each movie, which comes out to 576 dollars.
You mean, you'd need four of those drives to store all 100 movies, which is $576 vs. the $2,000 to buy all 100 movies, rather than needing for 500 gig drives to store each 20 gig movie.
People often contrast Torvalds and Stallman as being pragmatic and idealistic, respectively. I don't think this is the case. Stallman *is* pragmatic - the only thing is, he's pragmatic about the long-term consequences and Torvalds only looks at the short-term consequences.
People (especially on slashdot) like to say that, too, but I don't think that's any more true; I think that Torvald's and Stallman both have different value systems against which they evaluate long-term effects, and different practical judgements about what the effects are likely to be.
One example of this is the version control debate. Stallman rightly pointed out that Bitkeeper was a problem waiting to happen, and Torvalds didn't care until it was too late. Sure, you might say that the problem was avoided because Torvalds wrote git. But if he'd have done that in the first place, git would have been years ahead in development by now, and the Linux community could have avoided an embarrassing debacle.
OTOH, Had he done that earlier, he wouldn't have done something else earlier. Avoiding an
"embarrassing debacle" that few people not committed to open source and friendly to Linux are even aware of, much less care about, may not have been worth the opportunity cost.
Now I'm not saying that everything Stallman does is perfect. But he has a history of being right, even in the face of people saying that he's wrong or that it doesn't matter.
If you predict something will someday become a problem, you can never be wrong, only not yet proven right.
What bothers me is that the actual education part is very handwavey -- throw a bunch of laptops out there and assume that learning will follow.
I think, that while the project itself is developing content and has some ideas about how to use them in education, the expectation is that governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware will also spend a few man-hours on their own considering how they might best apply that hardware in their own educational system.
There's no magical thinking involved here, and certainly not the arrogance of trying to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to education on the recipients.
Because a laptop is the same thing as an education.
The point of the OLPC project is to sell laptops and provide associated content and services to national ministries of education to support their efforts to improve delivery of education.
No one is saying that the laptop, in and of itself, is (or substitutes for) education; what is being said is it is intended (along with the associated content and services) to improve and facilitate education.
Retail Sales on the Open Market This part of the model is currently not clearly defined. Firstly, it is not something that OLPC itself will do either now or in the future. However, there will be retail sales of 2B1 or similar models. This will happen sometime after the initial country rollouts when the manufacturers are comfortable enough with production on a large scale. At that point, there will be a process for retail sales channels to licence the design and contract for it to be manufactured targeted directly at the retail market. Given the expectation of volume shipments of educational units in the summer of 2007, it is unlikely for retail sales to begin before 2008.
Initially, this is likely to be for units virtually identical to 2B1 targetted solely at the educational market in North America and Western Europe. But the design will be available for licensing to companies who want to produce a device for the open market. Before this will happen, the OLPC will review their licencing terms to determine what special restrictions may need to be placed on open sale of these laptops. This is done in order to protect the educational deployments which are, and will remain, the primary focus of the OLPC.
Any restrictions will be designed to limit the possibility of educational units being diverted to the open market. This likely means that the case styles will be different and that units may have some enhanced capabilities such as built-in Ethernet, extra flash RAM or it may be required that they are bundled with one or more accessories.
But there's something about it that nags at me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Something a little condescending, a little too much hubris about it all. The way the planned recipients of these devices are described almost in cargo-cult like terms.
Please provide an example of the OLPC project describing the planned recipients of the devices in anything fairly described as remotely resembly "cargo-cult like terms".
Also, if you want to know who he's talking to, read any other Slashdot post about the OLPC. He's talking to every person on Slashdot who said "you idiot, this isn't for bare-means countries in Africa, it's for countries like Libya and Brazil." in response to anyone pointing out that starving people have little use for a computer. So which is it, Slashdot?
People and countries are two different things. In point of fact, the countries participating in the OLPC project are not the poorest countries in the world (though some other countries, like Libya, have been discussing the possibility of sponsoring some of those poorest countries so that they, too, could get the laptops.) However, the people that it is intended to benefit the most (but not the only people that it will benefit) are, as Negroponte says, among the poorest people in the world, rural villagers in the developing world to whom it is difficult to deliver services and who have limited infrastructure.
Now, the poorest people in the poorest countries have governments (if they have functioning governments at all) that have more pressing needs than educational technology, and lack the educational systems in which to make use of such technology. And their ministries of education are unlikely to be buying the machines.
There is a surplus of used computers in the world, these are the computers people in poor areas need.
No, they aren't. They aren't designed for use in rural areas with limited power and other infrastructure, the OLPC machines are. Further, the used computers aren't to one standard, the OLPC machines are, which enables national ministries of education buying them to support them more easily, and have standard software and content that works the same on all of them. Etc.
They would be cheaper than $150 each to buy and ship,
Not much, if at all.
and they would be of far more use than these crappy laptops.
Actually, they'd be far less use. They aren't designed for the use they'd be put to, they often aren't reliable to start with, they don't present a common, open platform. They don't, unlike the OLPC machines, have keyboards specific to the receiving country to accommodate national languages. In short, they are nearly, if not entirely, useless for the role that the OLPC machines are targetted for.
Probably not. The hesitancy is because OLPC sees social disapproval as a key component of discourage theft and resale, and therefore doesn't want to sell the same computers to the public; they've stated more than once that once they get rolling with the main units, they may look at a distinctive commercial derivative for individual sale.
After all if they want to give a million of these away and people like/.ers buy 100,000... while that would mean money to give 100,000 laptops away to kids we just bit 10% of their production away.
They aren't giving any away, they are being purchased by national ministries of education. IIRC, the goal was to get commitments on orders for 5 million before starting production, and has already been exceeded.
If it can't sell commercially its not likely to be a success in its main aid mission either
It doesn't have an aid mission. Its not soem gift being airdropped by the West onto developing nations, its something national governments are buying.
If it can sell commercially then economy of scale will help lower the cost per unit for that main mission.
Its main mission provides more of an economy of scale (and without the hassle of dealing with retail networks or direct support of individual users) than marketing to consumers would be likely to.
Why would they not want to sell the initial run of these things at a markup to us decadent westerners in order to get the volumes up and bring down the unit cost?
Assuming this part is serious, and only (if anything) the later questions were sarcastic...
The orders they are taking are something like 1 million+ units per order; it would take a huge (and expensive) marketing blitz to even have a remote chance of getting enough consumer sales to make a substantial difference in the overall volume and unit cost. Plus, selling the same units (rather than a visually distinctive consumer model as the OLPC folks have talked about as a possible follow on) would undermine their efforts to use social disapproval as a method of restraining theft and resale. Plus, further, the markup would be huge: the reason the laptop is so inexpensive isn't just the components, its the lack of the kind of retail chain, facilities for individual support, etc., that are needed to support a consumer product.
just bought an Ipaq with very similar specs for 120 dollars. The only thing the laptop has is a bigger (but lower quality) screen...
Really? Which Ipaq, exactly, did you buy for $120 with a 1200x900 pixel monochrome reflective display that could also function in a lower resolution color mode?
1. Selling the same model would undermine the social-disapproval mechanism the project hopes will discourage a gray market in the OLPC machines; which is why the program has often said they are looking at making a distinctive derivative version of the machine for individual sale.
2. The price point is controlled by the fact that they aren't supporting an infrastructure for individual sales/support/etc., only selling to national ministries of education in enormous lots. Paying twice the cost that governments were buying them for in bulk wouldn't be enough to support commercial individual sale and have excess "profit" to subsidize delivering one to the developing world.
The only problem I see right now is that right now the Pirate Bay is operating inside a real country. If they move to sealand, what's to stop the MPAA/RIAA from buying an old Russian Bomber / Diesel Sub / whatever and just destroying the whole platform?
The fact the MPAA/RIAA consist almost entirely of US citizens, and conspiring to murder people overseas is a rather serious crime in the US.
Also, the fact that the UK still claims soveriegnty over Sealand though it hasn't tried to take Roughs Tower back, and would probably vigorously prosecute the killers (and, for that matter, would probably defend the Tower against outside attack.)
What if the Brits get pressured into eliminating this grave threat to the international recording industry?
What I wonder is why not release a "phone-less" version of the iPhone at the same time -- take out the cell phone features, leave the wifi and widescreen iPod and you've still got a very desirable device, but without the contract commitment and monthly fees. Then watch them fly off the shelves...
The contract commitment subsidizes the price; it'd probably be another $100-$200 more without the contract, and the phone features that would be removed probably don't add anywhere near that much to the price. So I don't think they'd sell that many more.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, they looked it up in the Enterprise's local copy of the Starfleet security database, they didn't read it off the screens of the Defiant.
Because at screen resolutions, many fonts designed for math use make the relevant symbols quite clearly distinguishable. Sure, they "look nice" at higher resolutions. That's not the issue.
The fact that experts disagree on its exact implications means that there is a huge nebulous grey area where it is quite conceivable that their counsel advised them to avoid stepping in because, whether it was clearly required or not, it created substantial risk of liability which could be avoided. Particularly when regulators are presently taking a microscope to Apple over compliance with accounting rules, an excess of caution isn't really surprising at all.
The way to avoid things like this is to write laws that are clear enough that there are not large areas where experts disagree on what the law means.
When DARPA is handing out grant money, people tend to make an effort, even where others have failed in the past. That being said, its somewhat interesting that of the languages developed for this DARPA program, the IBM entry (X10) extends Java.
Fortress is not, from the description, a "programming language for the masses", but rather one designed for a specialized scientific user-base.
So, it requires either a special keyboard or special input method to use effectively. So what?
The monitor is not the issue, the font is. OTOH, specialized fonts that make the distinctions necessary for unambiguously representing complex mathematical notation are hardly unknown, particularly among the target user base of Fortress.
That's a nice theory, and maybe that's the best way for some programming. Maybe its not the best way for others.
I suspect that, as the characters are Unicode as noted in the same FAQ entry as the syntax example PDF, more traditional editing environments will work, though special keyboards or at least keymappings may become a necessity for using it. Given, though, the orientation of the language, that's perhaps a sane approach. Learning how to do the entry for it may be less of a barrier than learning an entirely new vocabularly and its mapping to standard mathematical expressions.
When you hear "potential terrorists" you should recognize that it means "everybody", since until they've checked you out, they don't know that you aren't a terrorist, and until they know that, you remain a "potential terrorist".
Well, a few probably could, but its cheaper (and provides a some distance which is useful for PR purposes) for them to pay governments (or, more often, just a handful of individual government officials who can steer government policy) to do it for them.
You mean, you'd need four of those drives to store all 100 movies, which is $576 vs. the $2,000 to buy all 100 movies, rather than needing for 500 gig drives to store each 20 gig movie.
I think, that while the project itself is developing content and has some ideas about how to use them in education, the expectation is that governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hardware will also spend a few man-hours on their own considering how they might best apply that hardware in their own educational system.
There's no magical thinking involved here, and certainly not the arrogance of trying to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to education on the recipients.
The point of the OLPC project is to sell laptops and provide associated content and services to national ministries of education to support their efforts to improve delivery of education.
No one is saying that the laptop, in and of itself, is (or substitutes for) education; what is being said is it is intended (along with the associated content and services) to improve and facilitate education.
Well, here's what the OLPC Wiki says:
Retail Sales on the Open Market
This part of the model is currently not clearly defined. Firstly, it is not something that OLPC itself will do either now or in the future. However, there will be retail sales of 2B1 or similar models. This will happen sometime after the initial country rollouts when the manufacturers are comfortable enough with production on a large scale. At that point, there will be a process for retail sales channels to licence the design and contract for it to be manufactured targeted directly at the retail market. Given the expectation of volume shipments of educational units in the summer of 2007, it is unlikely for retail sales to begin before 2008.
Initially, this is likely to be for units virtually identical to 2B1 targetted solely at the educational market in North America and Western Europe. But the design will be available for licensing to companies who want to produce a device for the open market. Before this will happen, the OLPC will review their licencing terms to determine what special restrictions may need to be placed on open sale of these laptops. This is done in order to protect the educational deployments which are, and will remain, the primary focus of the OLPC.
Any restrictions will be designed to limit the possibility of educational units being diverted to the open market. This likely means that the case styles will be different and that units may have some enhanced capabilities such as built-in Ethernet, extra flash RAM or it may be required that they are bundled with one or more accessories.
Please provide an example of the OLPC project describing the planned recipients of the devices in anything fairly described as remotely resembly "cargo-cult like terms".
People and countries are two different things. In point of fact, the countries participating in the OLPC project are not the poorest countries in the world (though some other countries, like Libya, have been discussing the possibility of sponsoring some of those poorest countries so that they, too, could get the laptops.) However, the people that it is intended to benefit the most (but not the only people that it will benefit) are, as Negroponte says, among the poorest people in the world, rural villagers in the developing world to whom it is difficult to deliver services and who have limited infrastructure.
Now, the poorest people in the poorest countries have governments (if they have functioning governments at all) that have more pressing needs than educational technology, and lack the educational systems in which to make use of such technology. And their ministries of education are unlikely to be buying the machines.
No, they aren't. They aren't designed for use in rural areas with limited power and other infrastructure, the OLPC machines are. Further, the used computers aren't to one standard, the OLPC machines are, which enables national ministries of education buying them to support them more easily, and have standard software and content that works the same on all of them. Etc.
Not much, if at all.
Actually, they'd be far less use. They aren't designed for the use they'd be put to, they often aren't reliable to start with, they don't present a common, open platform. They don't, unlike the OLPC machines, have keyboards specific to the receiving country to accommodate national languages. In short, they are nearly, if not entirely, useless for the role that the OLPC machines are targetted for.
Probably not. The hesitancy is because OLPC sees social disapproval as a key component of discourage theft and resale, and therefore doesn't want to sell the same computers to the public; they've stated more than once that once they get rolling with the main units, they may look at a distinctive commercial derivative for individual sale.
They aren't giving any away, they are being purchased by national ministries of education. IIRC, the goal was to get commitments on orders for 5 million before starting production, and has already been exceeded.
It doesn't have an aid mission. Its not soem gift being airdropped by the West onto developing nations, its something national governments are buying.
Its main mission provides more of an economy of scale (and without the hassle of dealing with retail networks or direct support of individual users) than marketing to consumers would be likely to.
Assuming this part is serious, and only (if anything) the later questions were sarcastic...
The orders they are taking are something like 1 million+ units per order; it would take a huge (and expensive) marketing blitz to even have a remote chance of getting enough consumer sales to make a substantial difference in the overall volume and unit cost. Plus, selling the same units (rather than a visually distinctive consumer model as the OLPC folks have talked about as a possible follow on) would undermine their efforts to use social disapproval as a method of restraining theft and resale. Plus, further, the markup would be huge: the reason the laptop is so inexpensive isn't just the components, its the lack of the kind of retail chain, facilities for individual support, etc., that are needed to support a consumer product.
Several reasons why not, most notably:
1. Selling the same model would undermine the social-disapproval mechanism the project hopes will discourage a gray market in the OLPC machines; which is why the program has often said they are looking at making a distinctive derivative version of the machine for individual sale.
2. The price point is controlled by the fact that they aren't supporting an infrastructure for individual sales/support/etc., only selling to national ministries of education in enormous lots. Paying twice the cost that governments were buying them for in bulk wouldn't be enough to support commercial individual sale and have excess "profit" to subsidize delivering one to the developing world.
The fact the MPAA/RIAA consist almost entirely of US citizens, and conspiring to murder people overseas is a rather serious crime in the US.
Also, the fact that the UK still claims soveriegnty over Sealand though it hasn't tried to take Roughs Tower back, and would probably vigorously prosecute the killers (and, for that matter, would probably defend the Tower against outside attack.)
Well, yeah, that's more realistic of a problem.
The contract commitment subsidizes the price; it'd probably be another $100-$200 more without the contract, and the phone features that would be removed probably don't add anywhere near that much to the price. So I don't think they'd sell that many more.