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Pirates, Web 2.0, and Hundred Dollar Laptop
from the arr-pirates dept.
Update on the One Laptop per Child Project. dominique_cimafranca writes "Ethan Zuckerman gives a report on his visit to the headquarters of the One Laptop per Child project. Some details on practical design considerations such as the hinge, the rabbit ears, and why the hand crank was ultimately left out (apparently, Kofi Annan broke the crank on a prototype). Several pictures, and a look at the motherboard of the OLPC laptop."
TOR Calls Out Torvalds, Stallman on Web 2.0. theodp writes "In an unusual defense of partner CMP's trademarking of Web 2.0, Tim O'Reilly points a finger at Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman in his rebuttal posts. TOR also says the blogger who posted the O'Reilly-approved cease-and-desist letter from CMP 'owes us an apology for the way he responded' (he got one)."
Fallout from The Pirate Bay Raid. Tyler Too writes "The Swedish national police website has been taken offline by a denial of service attack which started Thursday night. That's not the only fallout from the raid on The Pirate Bay: there's a demonstration planned in Stockholm on Saturday."
U.S. Government Ordered The Pirate Bay Shutdown? mkro writes "According to the Swedish government sponsored tv channel SVT, U.S. government officials -- after being approached by the MPAA -- requested the Swedish justice department to take down The Pirate Bay. According to the story, the Swedish justice department asked police and prosecution to act, but when they explained the laws are too vague, they turned directly to the state attorney and the chief of the national police force."
tpb (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:tpb (Score:5, Funny)
Join the **AA cabal... (Score:5, Funny)
MPAA: get Heathrow drug dogs sniffing DVDs!
RIAA: get Swedish police shutting down torrents!
GNAA: get chocolate buttsecks!
THE Police Website. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.polisen.se/ [polisen.se]
Zero point energy (Score:5, Funny)
And the guy's writing the article for IEEE Spectrum [ieee.org]. Good luck in your next job.
Re:Zero point energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus, I must assume that the blog is a general description of the product specifications, not a detailed, technical presentation. (My apologies if I am wrong.)
That said, the portion you cited is an acceptable simplification of the actual product specs, when the target audience is non-techincal. It may have been more accurate to say the following:
"The current prototype accepts input voltages from 2.25 to 23 Volts, including sources with high noise components. It can also correct for inverted supply inputs, allowing it to effectively support -2.25 to -23 Volts."
However, a non-technical person (perhaps even just a non-electrical engineer) would get little to no additional information from my quote than from his. Why should he write overly-complicated blog posts above the technical comprehension level of his intended audience?
Again, I cannot verify the blog post's intended audience, as I cannot access it. However, this is not the first time I've seen people on Slashdot react to non-technical writing by technical people, and attack those people for that writing. Instead of doing this, the correct response is to examine both the writer and his intended audience. If people on Slashdot are not the intended audience of the post, then the Slashdot reader should judge the technical level as the intended reader would, not as he or she does.
Re:Zero point energy (Score:5, Informative)
and hacking the media.
June 1, 2006
It's cute. It's orange. It's got bunny ears. An update on the One Laptop Per Child project
Filed under: Developing world, ICT4D, Geekery -- Ethan @ 5:52 pm
Last Friday, I visited with my friends Walter Bender and Jim Gettys at the new headquarters of the One Laptop per Child Project - the past few days have been so busy that I'm just getting the chance to write up notes from our conversation now, almost a week later. I'm writing an article for the IEEE Spectrum on the project and had asked Walter if I could come by and grill him on the technical and conceptual details of the project. But that's really just an excuse - I'm fascinated by the project, and am trying to offer what help I can to Nicholas Negroponte and his team in helping people understand what the project is and isn't, offering my perspective on how the device might best be rolled out, supported and used in developing nations.
One of the most interesting phenomena surrounding the One Laptop Per Child project has been the amount of attention it's garnered, not just from the development community, but from average users around the world. Interest in the project seems to focus on a basic and very compelling idea: a laptop that costs a hundred dollars or less. After writing a long blogpost on the project and an article at Worldchanging.com, I now average receive on average 20 emails per week asking to purchase the laptop, or recieve one as a gift. I now have a keyboard macro that gives a stock response: I'm not officially affiliated with the project, the laptop isn't available yet, and when it is, it will be sold in lots of a million or more to governments and school systems.
Most of the people who write me are interested in owning a laptop they can afford. And that, it turns out, is not the goal of the One Laptop Per Child project. Their goal is to produce a laptop designed for use by children - students in grades K-12. And that requires radically different design decisions that what one would make in simply creating a low-cost laptop.
IMG_0059.JPG
Getting across the distinction that this is a children's laptop, not just a cheap laptop, is a surprisingly difficult task. When I last wrote about the laptop on Worldchanging, a number of commenters mentioned that they'd like one of the computers as a backup or travel computer - I suspect they might feel differently after playing with one of the current prototypes. They're really small. This is a good thing - I wouldn't want a kindergarden student carrying around my 12 PowerBook - it's too heavy and too fragile. The current prototype is little, orange, and very, very cute. It has a molded plastic handle and looks remarkably like a Speak and Spell.
It's got bunny years - antennas for the 802.11s wireless radios, which are designed to self-assemble meshes with other laptops. The ears fold down to cover the USB, power and mic ports, an excellent design for the sorts of dusty environments I can imagine the device used in. The screen in the current prototype is a conventional LCD screen - the screen in the production devices will be roughly the same size, probably slightly larger than the 7.5 screen in the prototype, but will be based around a technique that doesn't require white fluorescent backlight. (Many of the questions I need to answer for the IEEE article concern the screen, as it's one of the most expensive and power-hungry components of the machine.) The keyboard is about 60% of the size of a conventional keyboard and has calculator-style keys.
My favorite feature of the current prototype is the hinge that holds the machine together. Ever since Nicholas outlined the engineering challenges of building a good hinge, I've been fascinated by the different ways people attach screens to laptops. As promised, the laptop can be folded into an ebook, with the screen on top, used as a handheld game player, or have the screen turned around so the machine can be used
Way to Un-clarify (Score:5, Informative)
If one reads O'Reilly's post, the entire endeavor undertaken in the post is to explain how USUAL the cease and desist letter that was issued is when defending a trademark. And then he cites Torvolds and other as examples of other people who have trademarks they wish to defend. There's no finger pointing going on, nor is there any oddity in his defense. Which again, is the whole point of O'Reilly's discussion. This entire thing has been blown way out of proportion, and i'm amazed that someone can read O'Reilly's piece and then go ahead and incorrectly convey the content.
What irony.
Fallout (Score:5, Informative)
Pirate Bay will reappear in Ukraine, Russia, The Netherlands and three other countries. People have been very generous with equipment and hosting as soon as they heard it was the Pirate Bay folks asking for assistance.
The Swedish Police site, www.polisen.se, was taken out for a day with a sustained DoS attack. An investigation has been started.
The public is in favor of the Pirate Bay in numbers like 90-10 or so, and most are extremely critical of the action against the Pirate Bay, especially since the police used 50 police officers to seize two computer nerds and their legal representative. A whole slew of innocent operators were also having their machinery seized, in an unconstitutional manner.
The action may have a real political effect, come the September elections.
Re:MY side of the story (Score:5, Interesting)
You're implicitly assuming that most of the pirated copies are a forgone sale. Most of them are likely to be teenagers who never would've bought from you anyway. Most people downloading are time rich, money poor.
You're also assuming that all those copies provided you with no exposure. For all you know that piracy may've been encouraging, not depressing, your sales.
Bottom line is you have no idea. So don't get all uptight about it.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
More on TPB (Score:5, Informative)
Brilliant Move (Score:5, Insightful)
Because nothing increases support for your cause like DoSing a police website...
Giving orders to police illegal (Score:5, Informative)
US interest acting abroad: Scientology (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article
In September 1996, an anonymous user posted the confidential writings of the Church of Scientology through the Penet remailer. The Church once again demanded that Julf turn over the identity of one of its users, claiming that the poster had infringed the Church's copyright on the confidential material. The Church was successful in finding the originating e-mail address of the posting before Penet remailed it, but it turned out to be another anonymous remailer: the alpha.c2.org nymserver, a more advanced and more secure remailer which didn't keep a mapping of e-mail addresses that could be subpoenad.
Facing multiple criticism and attacks, and unable to guarantee the anonymity of Penet users, Julf shut down the remailer in September of 1996.
Truly a chilling possibility.
MPAA suing isoHunt this week too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MPAA suing isoHunt this week too (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/05/31/
There is more at http://www.isohunt.com/ [isohunt.com] too.
Misnomer (Score:5, Informative)
The fact is that they are lobbyist groups; simply petitioners to the US Government. Sadly, they are wealthy, numerous, and well connected petitioners, so they get preferential treatment, but neither of them is a government body any more than any group of citizens. They way they "win" their cases is by having enough money and fear tactics at their disposal to dodge court time and exploit holes in the American judiciary.
Re:Misnomer (Score:5, Informative)
Translation of the swedish article (Score:5, Informative)
The US government behind closing of site
The US government was behind the raid against the filesharing network Pirate Bay yesterday, according to sources to the SVT news program Rapport.
In april a delegation with members of the justice department and the police met up with american authorities who brought the issue up by request of the MPAA. The interest organisation of Hollywood.
The justice department then requested the police and prosecutors to act. When they replied that the legal issues where unclear the minister of justice's secretary of state contacted the state prosecutor and the state chief of police who in turn ordered action.
Minister rule
The Pirate Bay has openly challenged right-holders within the film and music industry. Nevertheless many in the internet society are surprised of the actions of the swedish authorities.
This is what happened according to sources. The american interest organisation MPAA contacted the gorvernment in the white house. The american department of foreign affairs then contacted the swedish department of foreign affairs and demanded the issue with Pirate bay be solved.
According to the source the prosecutor and the police was ordered to act and describes the actions of the secretary of state as minister rule.
Re:My Government is POISON to the rest of the worl (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My Government is POISON to the rest of the worl (Score:5, Interesting)
So instead of cutting out on us, why don't you just elect a president that doesn't suck next time, 'kay?
Re:My Government is POISON to the rest of the worl (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is the US pressured another government to take down a site that was LEGAL in the country it was in.
SciFi Vs OSS, oh noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I have never heard any one abbreviate Tim O'Reilly TOR.
Re:SciFi Vs OSS, oh noes! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, yeah. And Linus is LBT (which is also Lettuce, Bacon, and Tomato), Alan Cox is AC (anonymous coward), Paul Graham is PG (parental guidance - which is way too mild, IMO, for his near-pornographic technical book, On Lisp), and Bruce Perens is BP (blood pressure, Black Panthers, or Solomon Islands, of all things).
Huh. Maybe we should stick to spelling out the names. Except RMS (root mean square - voltage and stuff) and ESR (electron spin resonance), because we've been using those for years.
trademarking "404" (Score:5, Funny)
From now on, all use of "404" on the internet is subject to licensing fee.