Alan Parsons says I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics.
Agreed, maybe people without a dedicated room or who are renting feel limited in what they can do, but it makes a big difference.

If you have small or "bookshelf" speakers, put them on rigid stands. Read up on speaker positioning; get some test signals off the web and really well-recorded music you're familiar with; then play one channel at a time while someone moves that speaker around (and you try out different listening positions); then adjust both speakers to get a good stereo spread. Use rugs and drapes to absorb first order reflections off the floor, side walls, and rear wall.

I paid Rives Audio to consult on my room layout, they suggested firing across the room instead of along it, putting sound deadening panels on the rear wall, using bookshelves to break up the side wall reflections etc. Money well spent. Meanwhile despite instant worldwide friction-free distribution, artists don't make enough from recording sales to pay for Alan Parsons and wind up making crappy home recordings or taking rough mixes from live gigs.

Actually, crap audio sounds worse on good speakers. The cheap speakers act as a filter, plus the ear/mind compensates so you clean up the sound. It's 'good enough'.
Many people say this, but not in my experience. I've played YouTube off a laptop, MP3s through smartphone headphone jacks, mono FM radio, and cassettes through my $20,000 system. At the same volume level, everything sounds better than on my $150 PC speaker system. No matter what the original is, distorting it some more and reproducing it through bad speakers doesn't help.

I truly hope some day you get to hear several $5000 speaker pairs through a decent front-end in a room with reasonably good acoustics so you can appreciate how wrong your first claim is. A great stereo setup puts a convincing (I hesitate to say "life-like" because that's not the goal of a lot of recordings) group of musicians in space in front of you, and you hear musical details you didn't know were there. I say several because speakers fall so short of reproducing live music that reasonable people prefer very different speaker designs (compact monitors, towers, horns, flat panels, omnidirectional, etc.).

As for cables, I had radio interference and noise using ~$10 Radio Shack RCA interconnects. Switching one channel to a quality Blue Jeans Cable for ~$50 dramatically reduced it as confirmed by an SPL meter. I'm confident that paying increasingly outrageous sums beyond that for audiophile cables would produce minimal audible benefits, if any. As Alan Parsons points out, room acoustics are more important and I have yet to mount the diffuser panels on my ceiling that the acoustic consultant recommended.

In the latest stable release on my G1G1 XO-1, pressing View Source (Fn + Space) opens up a nifty project source code browser for Chat, Paint, Read and other Python activities I tried (it's pretty cool!).

The Sugar Journal is just different. If you don't name you get Paint Activity, Chat Activity, etc. which is no worse than having New document.odp, New document(2).odp, etc. It's BETTER for kids because there's no folders to navigate. The Sugar developers have smoothed a lot of the rough edges and improved things, e.g. the default when you start an activity is to resume your last document.

PDF support was terrible, but you can blame Evince and Poppler for not managing memory better on a device with only 128kB RAM. These days the Read activity remembers the last page you're on and has bookmarking with notes! You can flip the screen and close the keyboard and still use the arrow and game keys work to move/zoom/page around, so maybe it works better as an e-reader. (Also you can now open PDFs within the browser, but that doesn't work as well.)

As people work on the software it slowly improves, and new releases incorporate improvements in Fedora, GTK, Abiword, etc. The constructionist (or is it constructivist, I get my pedagogical terms confused) activities like Scratch and Turtle Blocks are impressive. But I don't think many adults would enjoy using an XO over a conventional laptop or desktop. I had run Sugar under qemu so I knew I wouldn't be blown away by my G1G1 laptop, regardless of Nicholas Negroponte's sales hype. I think OLPC has it exactly right these days, provide laptops to anyone with a credible project that advances their educational aims.

OLPC's customers are educational organizations that can implement "one laptop per child".

A lot of the OLPC software effort is easing the hard work of a deployment: managing reflashing hundreds of machines at once with a new distribution, restoring to a stable image, device backup, school servers, service & repair, etc. That's more involved than "selling low-cost computers" and it's different from "the democratization of computers". Android and ChromeOS have some similar facilities and someone could base large educational rollouts on them, but there's little money in it, so it seems if a non-profit is still the way to go.

You're confused (or writing poorly about fish). OLPC never "jettisoned" Sugar. The OLPC software distribution now offers a choice between the Sugar UI and a Gnome desktop, and supports running a version of Windows XP from SD card; OLPC provided these choices in response to those education customers. Of the 2.5M XO laptops out there, no large deployment is running Microsoft Windows. In many Sugar activities, pressing View Source (Fn + Space) opens up the Python source code (it's pretty cool!), and the source code from the firmware up is readily available.

Anonymous Coward wrote
My complaint with OLPC is rather than try to optimize the original hardware design to make it cheaper and more capable, they simply designed a completely new device.
The original XO-1 with AMD Geode LX was followed by the faster more powerful XO-1.5 with Via C7-M, an option for a non-membrane regular-style keyboard, and now an Marvell Sheeva ARM-based XO-1.75 is nearing beta. All use the same Yves Béhar/fuseproject industrial design and reuse some components such as the battery as the XO-1, so these worthwhile revisions didn't get much coverage.

According to the deployments page, there are "2.5 million XOs in the field as of November, 2011", mostly in Uruguay and Peru.

emscripten can compile C code, or anything that can produce LLVM bitcode, directly into JavaScript, allowing heavyweight code like Ruby/Python/Lua, physics engines, raytracing, FreeType, text-to-speech, etc. to run in a browser. JSLinux emulates the 386 instruction set to the point it can boot a stock Linux kernel, start a terminal, and run ELF executables like the Busybox command-line utilities in a browser (JSLinux's Fabrice Bellard could probably do MAME in JavaScript in his sleep one-handed.) So despite the innovations in Native Client, targeting JavaScript in an HTML5 browser is the way forward. And until Google implements Portable Native Client, NaCl doesn't even give you the ability to run in any Chrome browser, you need an architecture-specific executable. But portable NaCl is just running LLVM bytecode, and emscripten is already turning that into plain JavaScript without requiring a new black box in each web page.

Does anyone know if any of the native apps in ChromeOS/ChromiumOS and Android are written in NaCL or PNaCl? That would make some sense.

Stop thinking there's a single silver bullet. Driving a fundamentally more efficient car thanks to electric propulsion and regenerative braking is part of addressing energy consumption. And "so-called green" is as meaningless a phrase as "green".

That lifecycle study was produced by a UK "anything but batteries" consortium looking for government money for efficient internal combustion engine and flywheel (?!?) technology. It all hinges on your electricity generation mix (its 500 g CO2 per kWh iseems sky-high), but even an EV owner in a midwest coal-fired state can put solar panels on the roof.

Meanwhile your Lingenfelter C6 (nice car!) is based off a Corvette that gets 19mpg combined EPA. At 12,000 miles a year, every year it will consume 630 gallons of gasoline, or 2 tons, that turns into 6 tons of CO2. And each gallon took an additional ~0.25 gallons to produce, spill, and deliver. Even without the solar panels, if you live in a natural gas or hydro powered area (here's the EPA's map), an EV is "all that much better". And that's before you consider all the geopolitical, terrorist, financial, etc. downsides of gasoline.

It takes about 1000 gallons of embodied energy to make a 1.5-ton car, and most of the resources are recyclable. Meanwhile your 2001 Buick Regal gets 21 mpg combined according to the EPA. Over 120,000 miles it will consume 3,300 more gallons of gasoline than a 50 mpg Prius; that's 10 *TONS* more gasoline which turns into 32 *TONS* of CO2. (Here's a spreadsheet.) And every one of those gallons took additional fuel to produce, spill, and deliver.

That's why every reputable study concludes 75-90% of the lifetime pollution of a car occurs in its operation, not its production.

I'm not knocking you for driving an old car, so long as you don't drive much. But everyone who smugly puts down Prius/Leaf/Volt drivers for hurting the environment with their shiny new toys is misguided.

The Model S battery is swappable at a Tesla store, though Tesla is vague on the details.

An EV's battery pack weighs many hundreds of pounds and is integrated into the vehicle — under the floor in the Model S, in the trunk of the Focus Electric, in a T-shape in the Volt. How can you standardize that? Within that pack are sheets or modules of batteries that CAN be individually replaced in servicing, but they are offered by various battery suppliers and are integrated into thermal/electrical/safety monitoring systems, so swapping 7 modules becomes very time consuming.

Next problem is cost. A car battery isn't like a propane tank: the metal part costs way more than the fuel/electricity. Also, you'll only occasionally be swapping batteries, but if you get a dud you'll be recharging it over and over and eventually trying to sell it with your car. No one wants to swap their $10,000 pristine battery pack for a clapped-out battery that's only holding 70% of its original charge.

Better Place had your idea, they have a standardized QuickDrop swappable battery system that you can get in the Renault Fluence Z.E. (and NO other car model) and then exchange at a robotic swap station. To solve the dud problem, BP owns the battery and supplies you charge. But that makes buying/leasing the car a three-way deal, and it means a third party has to make money off what should be a cheap operation (recharging from the wall) while financing lots of extra batteries and building extremely expensive swap stations. You'll pay BP big $$$ for the convenience one way or another. BP is trying to make it work in Israel and Denmark (while doing a lot of PR and spin and shilling forums with crap about how they're big in China).

If and when battery density and economy both quadruple, you could imagine a car carrying half a dozen 40 pound standardized modules that you can add to for long trips or swap out for fully charged ones. Honda Power Systems is thinking along these lines, they announced a "Loop battery" concept about the size of a small briefcase that you can use to power a neighborhood EV ("golf cart"), then remove to power home tools, electronics, etc. Similarly, another Japanese automaker (Suzuki?) showed a scooter that can carry one or two removable battery packs.