Thank you for that article - awesome and interesting reading.

I'd really, REALLY like to get my hands on a powerful Linux laptop with such a high resolution screen... if I could afford it I might even settle for the virtual machine solution on the Mac, but a full-up Linux laptop with such a screen would be ideal.

During certain kinds of software development, it isn't uncommon to accumulate a dozen or more terminals and application windows displaying relevant content. Given good eyesight, there simply is no substitute for a high PPI screen when doing such work. Ditto for studying high resolution photos or working with computer aided design. If I could find an affordable IBM T221 monitor with the right adapters for modern graphics hardware, it would STILL be superior to anything I could buy at consumer PC monitor retail. (Unfortunately, the adapters and setup are apparently a tricky proposition even if you can find the monitor.)

I've looked now and then, but I still haven't been able to find any indication of when PCs will begin offering high PPI displays, or even whether the rest of the computer industry is *trying* to catch up with Apple in this respect. Has anyone seen any hints?

If we have to wait for "proper" OS support, they'll never come - the OS support won't be fully fixed until there is a demand for it. And the higher cost/lower yield for high PPI display production means it's a risky, difficult task to try boostraping the market from the manufacturing side.

I'm hoping a hybrid approach might be workable - at SIGGRAPH a few years ago, Microsoft was presenting work on technology for splitting a display signal up over multiple screens. If a way could be found to mount multiple iPhone-type screens into a monitor configuration and translate input over them, that might offer a viable way forward.

High density PPI displays are extremely expensive to produce because of the zero-defect-over-large-surface-area manufacturing issues. Since iPhone screens are smaller and already being produced in large numbers, it might be more practical to splice a bunch of those together. Edge visibility when "stacked" is probably the greatest physical hurdle - I'd guess it's a toss up between that and the inability of current graphics cards to drive such a monitor for "biggest practical hurdle."

Still, if one manufacturing process could turn out vast numbers of small screens that can either be used for phones or assembled into monitors... that seems to me like the only viable approach to the "too expensive to manufacture" problem you face with things like the IBM T221.

Acceptance of textbooks - verification of quality and being usable in courses - is a big hurdle. It's the equalivent to the problems open access journals are currently striving to overcome - building a reputation takes time, and without it viability in education/academia is a difficult proposition. Hopefully this is a useful way to start building momentum - I think it would be an excellent way to get more educational value for the dollar.

If the idea can gain broader acceptance, there are a number of interesting ideas for open source textbooks that can be tried. I like the idea of developing a K-12 and college educational plans in an "open source" fashion, identifying the resources needed, and mapping out the missing pieces as a guide for where to concentrate efforts to create open source teaching materials. I suppose there is only so much you can do to "solve" the problem of what constitutes good teaching materials, since that will vary with learning style, cultural and linguistic background, etc. but it would be nice to have a systematic framework and forum within which to try, evaluate, and evolve ideas. It will be interesting to see whether, as open source devs age and start having families, interest in open source educational materials also grows - that's when the question becomes directly relevant and worthy of resource commitment for a lot of people.

Ideally, open source materials could be managed for "dependency satisfaction" - i.e. mastery of the material in grade 6 materials associated with a project provides the necessary and sufficient foundation to learn grade 7 materials, and so on. That was sometimes a frustration for me growing up - structured resources with fine-grained pointers like "understanding of this concept requires understanding of X, Y and Z" from previous years would have been nice. Sort of "knowledge building a.l.a math proof."

Even for public domain recordings?

If they're complaining about having to compete with a more advantageous cost structure established by the non-profit for royalty requiring songs, I take it there would be no objection to the CBC streaming public domain and Creative Commons licensed content? (I'm assuming Canadian law doesn't mandate royalties be paid for any playing of any content, but that's an assumption - somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.)

On a broader scale, I sometimes wonder if we need to have a public conversation about the fundamental motivation for allowing and promoting non-commercial activity, and what kind of society we really want to be. As I understand it, non-profits get treated differently because they are (theoretically) providing some benefit to society at lower cost than would be necessary to an organization performing the same service while trying to make a profit at the same time. Lower cost means greater public benefit for the same resources committed, and that greater public benefit is valued more highly by society than the specific lost opportunity for someone to make a profit.

In principle, if you disapprove of non-profit activities, couldn't it be argued that the very existence of ANY non-profit is unfair competition to some potential for-profit company? Do people who think this way see any value in anything that isn't tied to profits? Are municipalities that want to provide public internet to all at low cost as a utility (information becomes just like power and water, not an unreasonable analogy given the way our society currently functions) doing something wrong? Are libraries ruining the commercial market for books and other consumer media? Are museums wasteful institutions because they lock up artifacts that could otherwise be immensely profitable as commodities being bought and sold in the art and collectibles markets? Is public schooling a bad idea because it competes with private schools that would otherwise be able to pick up the business? Where and how do we draw this line?

it's how you handle it that counts. Years ago, I was part of a program where a college did some summer school programs for (IIRC) middle school students designed to give them more exposure to science. On the whole it was a good program, but the college physics students working that summer looked at the physics questions on the final test and discovered several problems. To the credit of those running the program, when the college students pointed out the issues to the program leaders they either struck the questions or gave credit for correct answers when more than one answer was shown to be correct. And they did so as the test was in progress, rather than let the students trip on them and get slowed down. I was impressed at the time, and am more impressed in retrospect.

Science questions can be tricky to get right - what seems like an unambiguous question when it is written turns out to be much less so when you start thinking more "generally" about things like frame of reference. It's important to own up if those kinds of mistakes happen though, because the students who are thinking about the questions deeply enough to spot those issues are exactly the ones you most want to encourage in scientific study. The response "yeah you're technically right but we're not changing your score because we meant this" is very discouraging, and will tend to cause students to shy away from complex subjects. It demonstrates that learning the material is not always enough to get decent grades - why bother putting effort into it when there are other fields that more reliably reward their efforts?

Part of me wonders why teachers are still having to write their own questions for basic subjects like this... you'd think there would be Creative Commons licensed materials assembled that had been widely vetted and community reviewed... add a bunch of vetted, correct "twists" to each question that the teacher could opt for when assembling a given test and memorizing all the possible answers gets prohibitive - or at least, gets hard to do without actually learning what needs to be learned to answer correctly in the first place...

I'm using this driver (well, probably a slightly older version of it) with my desktop now, and so far I've been pleasently surprised. I don't need blazing fast performance on 3D for most things. FlightGear/OpenArena level games are about as far as I'm likely to push, since I'm not into the latest and greatest FPS anymore. Given that, the prospect of an integrated driver that "just works" without having to do anything extra is awesome.

My last Gentoo re-install I ended up trying the Nouveau driver after my attempt at enabling the binary NVIDIA driver didn't go well - had to flip on a couple kernel options to get acceleration, but after doing so and for my uses the results are "fast enough." I'll be sticking with Nouveau from now on unless I hit a major show-stopper. Well done, Nouveau team!

My guess is a disaster on the scale discussed would actually be less survivable than a remote hostile environment, for the simple reason that such a disaster would constitute an abrupt, dramatic shift in the environment with no (or at least, not enough) time to prepare our resources to cope with it. Not to mention the minor issue of deciding who survives out of the current world's population if our resources under disaster conditions can only handle 5% of the population - that alone might be enough to socially cripple beyond repair any effective survival measures.

Setting up shop in a remote hostile enviroment for the long haul is something we can do under calm, socially stable conditions that let us problem solve effectively. The kicker is of course whether there is enough incentive for us to commit the considerable resources it would take to actually achieve a survival result in such an environment - as you correctly note, it's a problem given our current technology. To me, the first thing to do is start improving our technology with an eye towards developing what we will need in such environments, before we go and try to set up shop there - no doubt many lessons would have to be learned in the attempt, but we can very likely do a lot "up front" to improve our chances of success (and probably produce some cool tech at the same time for domestic use.)

They have been told this:

http://www.slideshare.net/ckleclerc/2011-nasa-open-source-summit-david-wheeler

See in particular slide 22.

I suspect any meaningful change in the policy dictating NOSA use, if its even possible, will take years....

Banning hands-free cell phone usage raises some other interesting questions... should we ban talking to others in the vehicle while driving? Listening to talk radio while driving? Listening to music? (Who else has caught modern music using sirens and cell phone noises as faint background attention getters?)

I suspect the default assumption made about people objecting to a ban would be that those people don't want to lose the convenience of talking to their friends/family while stuck in traffic, and in a lot of cases that's probably a fair assumption. However, personal convenience issues aside, there are a lot of professions (real estate agents come to mind) who do a LOT of their business while between one location and the next. Really clamping down on such a ban would play havoc with them. What about doctors - should they no longer be allowed to be notified about patient emergencies while behind the wheel? Should police cars have to pull over in order to use their communications gear?

Banning texting strikes me as a no brainer (I'm more astonished anyone would actually *try* that...) and hands-on usage banning I agree with, but banning hands OFF communication seems to invite some complications that deserve careful thought. I have heard claims that even hands-off cell phone usage causes a dangerous degree of driver distraction and that might be the case, but does anybody know of actual published peer reviewed studies demonstrating that and what the numbers are compared to radio, in-car discussions and other such distractions?

Looks like they're using a non-commercial Creative Commons license for the images:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)

That trend seems to be popular when it comes to such efforts, and by and large I'm OK with it - preserving early manuscripts is not a zero cost operation, and the NC license allows the data to be distributed and made available for scholarship while still giving the holding institution the chance to recover some of the (usually non-trivial) expense of digitzation. Hopefully if they don't want to publish printed bound versions themselves they'll be willing to negociate with someone who is intersted...

There have been a number of other notable manuscript digitization projects of late:

British Libraries Digitised Manuscripts
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/

"Homer Multitext" - several manuscripts including Venetus A
http://www.homermultitext.org/

The Archimedes Palimpsest
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/

Personally I think such projects are absolutely vital to the long term preservation of these manuscripts. Modern technology makes possible the duplication of these source documents in high fidelity facsimile (Taschen in particular has published a number of fascinating editions, including Blaeu's Atlas Maior - another example would be The Book of Michael of Rhodes from MIT Press). So often works survive only as a copy of a copy of a copy, and we are left to peer through the murky glass of multiple interpertations at the far distant original author's intent. (The current definitive edition of Euclid, for example, is available to us only because of a single surviving early copy in the Vatican's library (which so far as I know has not been digitized, unfortunately, except for a couple images here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/math.html).)

We should be scanning and then printing many copies of these early works and depositing them in libraries around the world in order to help these early glimpses into our history survive (at least in SOME form, even if the originals are lost). Of course, multiple copies of the digital data is also very important, but we have no way of knowing how well digital data will survive on thousand-year time scales. Fingers crossed that we will see multiple volume facsimilie copies of Newton's notebooks (one volume for the facsimile, one for a modern translation ) on Amazon in the next few years...

I'd pay extra for an open phone, provided it did two things reliably - make calls and receive calls.

I was excited by the OpenMoko project, and I am still grateful for what they have provided to the community (among other things, the Computer Aided Design models for their phone case are still the best open source CAD models I know of). I even got my hands on a Neo1973 as a physical example of (some of) those CAD files, for reference. I have never seriously considered trying to use it as my primary phone, however.

Personally, I'm less concerned with "smart phone" features - my main phone is still the "old school" style without a touch screen, internet, or all of the features we commonly associate with things like the IPhone. That makes me a fairly good candidate for an open phone, so long as it can do phone calls well - the stability/in-development status of the rest of the "smartphone pacakge" wouldn't bother me so much. But it *does* need to do phone calls. Decent charging behavior would also be a plus.

If they can focus on and deliver those key things for the "next" version of the OpenMoko, I'm definitely going to be interested. Fingers crossed...

Monitor isn't the *only* investment grade hardware around - what about a Model M keyboard? I think mine has outlived at least two machines since I owned it (got it used in 2002 or so and it's dated from the 80s, so lord only knows how many before I got it), and I'll be replacing it with a new Unicomp Model M for my next machine (already got it ahead of time) only because I can't get adapters for the old style plug any more. It's still working great and I'd keep using it if I could.

Now *that* is durable hardware :-)

P.S. - that reminds me, anybody know of a USB adapter for old style AT keyboard? I know there are problems with not enough power being supplied from a single USB slot...