From Bruno the Bandit, by Ian McDonald

One Laptop Per Child is, in my opinion, a laudible and worthy goal... to create low-cost laptops that are then distributed for free to children in developing countries.

This is a worthwhile effort. There are people who feel the project is a waste of time, and that people should be focusing on other, more basic problems, but I believe that focusing on any one problem to the exclusion of all others won't solve anything. OLPC won't save the world but that doesn't mean it won't do good things.

That said, sometimes I worry about what exactly people involved in the project expect the children are going to get out of it. Take, for example, the following quote:

"A child doesn't want to play the latest video games. He wants to be able to read a book."
-Michalis Bletsas, OLPC official, as quoted in Linux Today

This quote is offered as an explanation as to why the laptop isn't powerful enough to play the latest and greatest games available on the market today, and it makes me want to bang my head against the wall until I lose consciousness, just to give me a moment of sweet respite from the silliness of the idea.

General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington. Now that's when you'll know there's a bubble...

This will a gentle cut, a minor nick if you will -- both because of the approaching holiday, when my thoughts ought to be focused on Love, Joy, Peace and GoodWill Towards Man, and also because I think the transgressor in this particular instance is more guilty of being too close to the perceived problem than he is of any kind of egregious journalistic excess.

That said, this caught my attention because it made the lists on Slashdot, and even the briefest episodes innocuous hyperventilation can suck all the air out of a room if you stuff enough people in it and get them to start hyperventillating at the same time.

From Superosity, by Chris Crosby.

Over at Ubersoft.net I took Infoworld to task for publishing a list of technology predictions for the coming year that were, as near as I could tell, mind-bogglingly lazy in scope. But Infoworld, it appears, is only a minor-league player in this vast wilderness of hyperbole-riddled pablum, and they have been trumped by another publication whose recent proclamations are so egregious that I was compelled to take Eviscerati.org out of the mothballs a little early (I'd planned on a 2007 revival) in order to do them justice.

CRN bills itself as "Vital Information for VARs and Technology Integrators." One assumes, then, that the information it chooses to publish on its site is information that VARs and people who spend their time integrating technology absolutely must have. The truth of this I leave up to those VARs and technology integrators who actually read the publication, since I am neither -- unless compiling the most recent version of ndiswrapper on my Kubuntu Edgy laptop in order to get wireless access counts as "technology integration." Still, after picking up on this little tidbit from Slashdot, I have to wonder if perhaps the VARs and technology integrators are getting their money's worth when they read this publication.

Like all publications that attempt to convince their loyal readers that they have their finger on the pulse of whatever part of society they are covering, CRN engages in end-of-year navel-gazing. Of particular note this month is their 2006 Products of the Year, a Top Ten list that purports to tell you the ten most important products that were released in 2006.

One of those products? Microsoft Vista.

El Goonish Shive, by Dan Shive.

I currently have two computers. Alex, my Windows XP machine, is used for games, file backups, and studio recording. (Mostly games and file backups these days, because my home studio is in disarray, but it's slowly getting sorted out.) Mark, my Linux laptop, currently runs Xandros Linux and is what I use for writing, web design, and my work on Help Desk and Kernel Panic. Of the two, Mark is currently FAR more important to me.

Which is, I believe, why it winds up breaking all the time.

From Superosity, by Chris Crosby.

The Free Software Foundation has announced that they are working on an update to the GNU General Public License. The proposed revisions aren't available for review yet (and won't be until early 2006) but they're already talking about a few of the changes, and one change in particular is provoking a lot of worry and speculation. The FSF is trying to downplay the extent of the changes, but at the same time they come across as just a little bit defensive when it comes to defending their right to update the license.

One particular change is causing some concern both within and outside of the free software community, and only time will tell if this change is going to go into the actual revision, or be abandoned as part of the FSF's own "practice movie." If it does get included, however, it suggests that the FSF is narrowing its focus. Some of its ideals aren't co-existing very well, so one of them is getting downgraded from "core belief" to "looks nice on paper."

Ideological triage: the unfortunate result of a successful revolution.