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Comment I had thought OLPC's goal was to provide textbooks (Score 1) 33

Many many years ago, I bought an OLPC, actually a pair, one for me, the other they sent to Africa or some other place. I do not remember the year even vaguely. I do remember it had a crank to windup and charge the battery. I bought the two because (from memory) the purpose of the laptop was strictly limited:

* Carry all textbooks on one laptop, instead of having to walk miles to school and back with a heavy backpack.

* Have modern eBook textbooks, not fifth generation hand-me-downs which had been written in a different language for a different country. This was certainly important for indoctrination in local history and culture, but it even applied to math textbooks, whose examples could well use cultural aspects which were literally foreign.

* Be rechargeable with that windup crank for kids whose homes had no electricity.

* Use a screen to read those books instead of having to stop using them after dark or by candles or oil lamps.

In particular, I had never heard that they were meant to teach computer science. It might have been a nice side effect, but I did not think it was any kind of a primary goal. The primary goal was to help young children learn.

Comment Re:HTWingNut (Score 1) 69

I'm not saying any particular person said that, and the question to Slashdot was asked over 2 decades ago. But I was assured that SSDs were "now reliable as an archival store", despite my informal test failure. (I had backed up something to them, and stuck them in a drawer for perhaps a year. They became unreadable.)

Comment Re:Not really new information... (Score 1) 69

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

Comment Re:HTWingNut (Score 1) 69

My sample size was small (just a couple), but it decided me not to trust SSDs for backup even though everyone on Slashdot said I should trust them. What I'm afraid is that portable USB drives will start being main with SSDs rather than spinning rust without bothering to tell me.

Comment Re:It could (Score 1) 220

They're passenger (and freight) trains. The rails were built for travel, not for scenic display.
OTOH, the sure aren't high speed rail. Most of the lines were build over 50 years ago.

OTOH, the BART example was for a "high speed train", though I believe the speed is limited underground. But the rise is from perhaps two or three stories below ground to about 1 story above ground. That said, I believe that the rise is about 2-3 miles long, so it's not steep.

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