And here I thought they'd only just adopted Hurd.

Well, keep watching. Apparently there's going to be some news on Wednesday.

It's a marketing stunt plain and simple. They're just coming out of beta.

Mine too. So naturally I had to search the comment threads to see if someone had posted it already. :)

Well, not "caves" per se, but we do have the Springfield Underground, an extensive system of underground limestone quarries, the mined-out parts of which have been converted into office, data hosting, warehousing, and manufacturing space. (Here's a video tour.)

I've been in it. It's pretty impressive.

You do realize that PG hasn't been ASCII-only for several years now, right?

For what it's worth, it's generated ill-will on the part of e-book consumers, too, many of whom feel this whole thing is yet another instance of the continued cluelessness over e-books that they've had to endure for the past ten years, and who feel that authors and publishers are deliberately ignoring them or misrepresenting their positions.

A couple of examples:

"Maybe we should be hurting the authors" by Ficbot
"The Amazon/Macmillan blow-up: An e-book lover's appeal for understanding" by me

I don't condone it. Just trying to explain the thinking behind it. You (or someone so far up the thread that I can't see who it was now) did ask.

I'd tend to agree with you. There are a number of things I enjoy reading or writing or playing video games about that I wouldn't dream of doing in real life. Skydiving, for instance.

But there are certain hot-button topics where you just don't want to take chances. Where even if you only screw up one time out of a thousand, it costs innocent lives. Ask the Secret Service how seriously they take even "obvious" jokes about threatening the President or his family, for instance.

Right or wrong, perceived threats to children are one of those hot buttons. (In fact, you could argue that, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's vital to overreact to threats to children.) There's a reason "won't somebody think of the children?" is such a cliché, and that's because it's true.

I think the theory is that "child porn" of any kind, including cartoon character or virtual, promotes the child-molesting mindset in a child-porn fan. So, even cartoon kiddie porn might make it more likely that the viewer might go and molest a real kid someday.

Not saying it's right, but just that I seem to remember hearing that's what the theory was.

That's exactly right. The only reason the OLPC group set out to design the XO in the first place was that there were no computers in that size and price range at the time. They simply did not exist.

Well, now they exist. Cherrypal is selling them. They're not going to have the same kind of standardized architecture that the XO does, but nonetheless they're Real Live Computers that can run real operating systems (and by "real operating systems" I of course mean Linux).

OLPC ought to be putting educational software on those rather than blowing more money chasing this touchscreen pipe dream.

To be fair, the approaches of the two projects are a bit different. OLPC is like the Apple of the third-world-laptop world. They're designing a specific set of hardware, and tailoring not just an OS but a specific educational software suite to run on it.

Cherrypal is like the PC, taking the "beige box" approach of just buy or throw together any old thing, all it has to do is access the Internet. Let the organizations who buy it come up with their own curricula.

(And by the way, my interview with the chairman of Cherrypal is now up on TeleRead.)

According to their chairman, they use Debian.

The niche is a little larger than that, actually, and it's an entirely different one.

The target are people who need Internet access but can't afford anything better. As more and more government and other services nudge people toward the Internet, those below the "digital divide" have an increasingly hard time accessing those services.

I talked with their chairman about it, and wrote up the interview last night.

It's the one linked from the the write-up, the link about buying odd lots.