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OLPC Project Interface Revealed
BogusToo writes to mention an EE Times article describing the interface for the OLPC project laptop. Using some fairly intuitive UI concepts (like simplified web browsers and a chat client), the Linux-based system attempts to do away with the kludgey parts of computer use. A video demo of the interface has been placed on YouTube. From the article: "Earlier postings around the Internet have also shown how the physical design of the laptop has changed, including the elimination of the much touted on-board hand crank that was supposed to power the cheap, lime green laptop. It's still there, reportedly, but has now been moved to the power adapter. The OLPC's produced earlier this week in Shanghai still need to go through loads of testing, such as knocking them off desks and dropping them in mud, as kids are wont to do. They may also be kicked around, like soccer balls, a popular sport in 99.9 percent of the world."
So when was the last time you say a child use the family laptop for a soccer ball? Grow up please.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Having worked for a school, I know how durable these devices are going to have to be to withstand day-to-day use. The Compaq, Toshiba and NEC laptops of 10 years ago didn't take much more than a nudge to the back of the LCD to crack it or break the backlight, leaving the (admittedly rich) parents to fork out another $3,000 for a replacement unit, or $1,200 for the out-of-warranty repair.
I hope that these computers end up being not just "cheap" but inexpensive to own, operate and repair. Insurance premiums on cars go up if the cost of parts/repair is high; the perceived value of this device changes in inverse proportion to this - why would a school/state/country buy thousands of them if the spare parts/repair cost is going to be high?
Here's hoping it's right when it comes out ...
WANRING: This warning is misspelt.
Why is the GUI non-standard?
Seriously... a lot of development effort must have gone into this thing - lots of custom applications and lots of new design. But why? Why not just use an off-the-shelf GUI: KDE for example? Surely there is a lot to be gained by mimicing the de-facto standards established by MacOS and Windows. It helps your users, and helps your developers, and helps third-party developers in the future.
I just don't get it: what is the benefit of reinventing this particular wheel?
Actually, although the youtube demo shows mostly everything, you can try it yourself using emulation (it runs on a x86 after all).
Intructions are here. It uses QEMU and a special 100Mb system image.
Happy slashdotting...
These people are hungry! Isn't it more important to get them clean water? Why would people who make less than a dollar a day want a computer? It's all a plot to enable the next generation of outsourcing. These people need sewing kits, not computers! If you give computers away you are furthering the evil cult of altruism. The color is uggggggly! How can I buy one?
There. Did I miss any?
Now you can talk about the contents of the article rather than blather about the same stuff that comes up every time the One Laptop Per Child project gets discussed.
Why are we doing this? These people don't need computers. They need more medical attention and food donations. If we give these people everything they want beyond what is needed for immediate survival, they will never feel a need to become self sufficient. This is global welfare gone bad.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
From TFV:
"Note that there is no url bar" (in the browser)
I really hope there's more to it than that. I mean, I realize that google isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but having any single search engine be the mandatory primary interface for the web, to the exclusion of even being able to type in urls directly seems insane to me.
<marge>Hrmmm....</marge>
Why do you think that this is aimed at starving kids?
This is insightful.
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I would have, but I needed to make a snarky comment.
Thanks pieleric!
I agree, I hope they can stand the rough climates of some of the third world countires... for example Chiapas climate (in Mexico) can be really hard for electronics (humidity and rain) and if this is going to kids who have never owned a high tech portable equipment they must be quite durable.
One thing I was wondering while watching the video is that it seems there is no way to open a terminal. I agree that the interface MUST be dumbed down a lot but I am also completely sure that there MUST be a terminal in order to access more "complex" things in the computer. I know (from personal experience) that the kids are the first ones to learn the new technologies and exploit them. If you are going to give them this computer, then lets make them able to get the most out of it.
A terminal and a python enabled system would be enough (IMHO).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
now they can google to find out how to stick a leg up instead of training a doctor or a nurse!
Sigh. It has been mentioned in every single OLPC discussion here in Slashdot that the laptop is not intended to be used in poor countries "where people starve all day inside their mud huts" (as people like to say here), but in places where kids have the most basic needs covered already, like Argentina, Lybia and [some parts of] Brazil.
.. to see Linux moving in. Custom interfaces for task-molded computers, and cheap too.
.. yet .. but for sure I will.
My only gripe with the OLPC is that I can't buy one for my son or daughter
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
....why is it only One Laptop Per Child, I mean, how stingy is that ?
They may also be kicked around, like soccer balls, a popular sport in 99.9 percent of the world.
If you thought curling was a strange sport, get ready for laptop soccer!
All the kids are doing it, well 99.9% of them at least!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It takes a world full of nerds and geeks to come up with a project like this where a big bunch of the planet still has NO electricity and NO running water, not to mention little food and illiteracy on a large scale.
While you are correct in part also consider the old saying: give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he will feed himself for the rest of his life.
If people are dying in a village because they have no food they need food first but after that what? Do you expected a never ending trail of planes dropping food forever? The unit could be used to help educate the village into doing what's right for themselves. By teaching better practices to the ignorant we can hope that they become self sufficient. Education is the foundation of a solid society.
It's not like they're shipping these things out with Counter Strike installed. These machines could become a keystone in fighting bullshit like illiteracy. They can learn the dangers of certain water sources and make better decisions on what crops grow best under conditions that these people can directly interact with.
A lot of the third world's problems would become vapor with a bit of the education that you and I take for granted.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
One of the things that sucks the most about GTK is the non-standard file dialog that doesn't allow you to type in a location or browse directories in a sensible way.
:)).
Unfortunately it is hard to avoid this, because many popular applications use it (Firefox, Azureus, and GAIM, to name but a few). Additionally, the GTK developers appear to be married to this design, despite many complaints (including a complaint from non other than Linus Torvalds, who called them "fucking idiots", IIRC
Is there any way to make a sensible file dialog appear instead? Like a 3rd-party patch that changes it?
If they survive, the machines will be shipped off to places like Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Thailand and Libya, where strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi signed a deal with Negroponte to supply the country's 1.2 million children with the machines and supporting infrastructure for $250 million.
Look at the list of deployment. These are not horribly poor countries. They have electrical infestructure, access to medical care in many cases, food, clothing, and domestic products they sell. What they lack is a well established educational system, or funds for the ever changing textbooks. This laptop is to eliminate the second, and help build the first.
Not to mention in even poorer countries, such as the Dominicain Republic, the best hope for leaving poverty is to get a job in the tourism industry. What are the qualifications for the best jobs? English. Computer skills. People skills. This project could help hundreds of kids grow up with a decent future that does not involve baseball in another land... Then as these people grow and earn more, their savings will be reinvested into improving the lives of themselves, and their families, lives. Better houses. Improved streets. Creature comforts. And a better school for their children.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
What do you mean 'we'? You aren't helping with the project, so what's it taking from you?
please start working to get some orginization, private or government or both, to buy a million of these for low income/no income children in the united states.
You want to help the people, get on it.
Bear in mind, that all the countries are paying for these.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
while much of the criticism is valid (why give a kid a laptop when you could feed an entire village for a year for the same amount) this project does not target world hunger. The same criticism might apply to many charities; Why have missionaries when you could take all that money going into air fare etc and give people food, why fight aids when third world hunger may be a more pressing problem (and I am not trying to diminish these problems, they are quite serious and yes I donate some of my money to hunger specifically) But the idea is there are places in the world where while hunger may not be a solved problem, there are socioeconomic classes which can eat, but can not afford lots of other things. This being one of them.
Okay great well what's that going to do for anyone? If suddenly some of these people are globally connected to the rest of the world, they can tell us very directly what their problems are and how they would like to world to act on them. They can get access to free information whe they might not even have a proper library in the area, they could conceivably culture the skills which would help them in their own communities in ways various charities haven't considered, and more rapidly. Has the water become contaminated? They may be able to research a sand filter. They could find out about the Germinated Brown Rice method, and increase the quality of local nutrition, or form international communities of developing locales that may exchange processes and information pertinent to ALL. This is just about empowerment, and the people who seriously can't feed themselves aren't going to need, want, or get these things.
Anyhow, just feeding someone won't solve the economic hardship that may have caused the hunger, where fair trade and human rights could improve their quality of life dramatically. Giving those countries a louder voice might be a big step there.
OLPC a huge waste of time? Maybe, this has yet to be seen. But why are we attacking a genuine effort to empower the voiceless when we should be demanding that our governments and communities jump in and take action?
Your most compelling argument is "Where do they get internet access from?", and that is probably the biggest problem with this plan, not that the laptop is worth a thousand pounds of grain. At least this is the way I see it.
I thought about putting together a similar program to deliver proper iPod adornments to kids living in areas stricken with moderate affluence, like Toluca Lake and such.
Sure these kids have their basic needs covered, Porsche, Fendi handbags, big screen plasma, but you won't see even one diamond encrusted Pave iPod case anywhere. All the kids in Montecito have diamonds all over their iPod cases and I'm tired of watching this parade of suffering pass by.
I don't understand the reason for the new user interface? It can't be due to resource limits, since they already ship GTK (with firefox), and it can't be for reasons of complexity, since most kids pick up computing skills really fast. So why re-write all the apps? I think that it's quite wasteful of programmer effort. Wouldn't it be better to work on reducing the resource requirements(*) of Gnome (refactor it to make some parts of it compile-time options)? Existing minimal linux distros (eg DSL) are very good at providing good programs with low resource requirements; they just need some "tidying" to make them more user-friendly.
* For lower resources still, use the excellent IceWM. But if we already have firefox, then we've already loaded GTK, and may as well use Gnome. Anyonw who wants a demonstration of how fast simpler programs can be, please try Dillo.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
There, said it. :(
I love how willingly Slashdot barfs up the Standard Propaganda. Third world countries are not poor because of some ethereal "lack of education." They are poor because we have their resources. Period. Its peasants and kings folks; the only difference is we got a few more kings now.
I think it's a bold experiment. What will poor children do when enabled with knowledge obtainable from the web? What happens when they have all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips? Will they continue to live as peasants? Will they rise up and build better lives for themselves? Will the realize that the rest of the world is horribly messed up for working so hard yet not obtaining the happiness they have?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
On the same note, they should remove "Solitaire" from all computers belonging to geeks.
I agree. This is a terrible mistake, and a terrible waste of time. It breaks software standards and de-facto user interface standards. It makes it hard for both users and applications to move between the OLPC and any other computer.
If I'd been on the OLPC team, I'd want to get everything done in the simplest way possible: I'd want to reuse software as much as possible, and I'd want to comply with every standard that I reasonably could, including user interface standards. Thanks to the extensive library of free software, it would be easy to get almost everything needed without having to write any code at all. But it seems that the OLPC developers knew better. I'd love to know why.
even so- rather than spend $X on this laptop project, why not take that same money and put it to countries that -don't- have the basics like food then? $208 per kid should cover a lot of food.
So the question is, what's more imporant- kids that barely have food get laptops (which is admittedly quite valuable for education purposes), or kids that have nothing get food.
Conceivably, the generation that get the laptops can then move on to feeding some of the ones that didn't get laptops, but meanwhile those people starve. So, do we enable more people to help others, at the cost of those starving today- or do we feed those starving today and then worry about educating them all once the basics are covered?
I thought that it was very cool, but I wonder how confusing the Squeak "playground" might be without some hands on training/tutorial.
I only spent 20 minutes running the image, but one thing that I did not notice was region-specific documentation for water cleanliness training, etc. I thought that these would be customized for each country/region. Does anyone know about this?
I was telling a lot of non-nerd friends about this project at a big Thanksgiving party yesterday, and not only did everyone really like the idea but no one seemed to think that this would seriously take away money from food, fresh water, etc. programs.
Scrap this UI! It's very crap thing.
Either use GNOME or KDE. But if this two can't be used, use IceWM with all the links pre-configured. We don't need to reinvent the UI again!!! Stop this non-sense and waste of time.
This criticism keeps coming up, but it's a non sequitur. It's a bit like saying "We can't cure cancer, so there's no point in trying to cure minor infections". Or like saying "As long as there's even one miserable person in the world, nobody should be happy".
The OLPC is for people who already have access to food, water, shelter and so forth. There are plenty of other initiatives to provide more basic needs. Support those if you want to, but don't knock this project. It's got the potential to do great things.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I think we will have to wait and see. I can understand if these kids pull short of the normal day bullshit that we put up with but being able to create a situation in which you have good food and water and the ability to take care of each other has to be a step up from waiting for handouts and dying a premature death from diseases that are easily dealt with.
In the end even if we only get these communities to the point where they become self-sufficient and not integrated into the over all culture of the world we won't have to continue to throw money at them hoping that eventually they get on their own feet. If there is anything that is clear in a "welfare state" it's that feeding the poor doesn't make them more productive, it just makes fatter poor people. Maybe with an education instead of a bowl of rice and a Twix bar these kids will pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Even if we only really help 3-4% of these people it may be a wise investment.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Presumably it's a memory issue. With 128MB or 512MB RAM (the website and the video seems to conflict) and flash as the only secondary storage (meaning you really don't want to swap) running a heavy desktop environment really isn't something you want to do.
Presumably it's a memory issue
Understood. But the machine is already loading the GTK libraries for Firefox. Those are huge. And it doesn't answer this question: why not just use a lightweight window manager?
The thought of all the extra work required to build, test and support this thing makes me feel ill. Especially when I know that KDE will run comfortably in 192Mb of RAM in "low graphics" mode (I have a six year old laptop with up to date KDE on it). And there are much lighter window managers than KDE!
Is this worse than bob? If removing tool bars and menus and only allowing one application to run at a time maximized was some sort of user interface panacea, I think every OS on the planet would already be operating that way. The actual reason for removing tool bars, menus, and forcing applications to run maximized: that's really easy to do. It is much much much harder to actually _create_ some kind of new user interface that will be 'easy' for anyone in the world to pick up and use, and then write applications that take advantage of that revolutionary new interface (there's no way to force existing applications into that hole). Much as it sucks, the WIMP paradigm is still the best anyone has ever come up with. Selectively disabling portions of WIMP (based on how easy it is to disable, not usability) doesn't make WIMP better. It makes it worse.
"Do you expected a never ending trail of planes dropping food forever? "
The more interesting question is what they did before planes or laptops.
Most of the extreme poverty and disease is a result of brutal regimes, the stealing of their land, deforestation, oil wars, chemical water poisoning, tribal wars with modern weapons, and the destruction of their way of life.
I am personally for these laptops as I feel that modern technology is largely responsible for ruining these people lives, so the only way they will ever have any power is to get control of technology.
staying ignorant when presented with new ideas and techniques might contribute to it, and yes, probably a matter of intelligence *in some cases*. It is not a universal thing, but applied generally..sure. If you have a group of folks who think raping 2 year old girls cures AIDS, yep, I'd call that lack of smarts on several levels leading to continual chronic poverty, both from ignorance and just..well..stupidity. I mean, that practice is just *stupid*, no two ways around it. How about thinking "dragon bones" are some sort of magical elixir? Is that ignorance or just ingrained, inbred stupidity? There's a fine line there some place...
And I think this is one of the goals of the OLPC, get some fast good way to get some real knowledge out to millions of more people in developing lands, so that this sort of thinking can be replaced with something a little better. Even starting with the youngest generation at least you might have a chance, kids are sure a lot easier to educate than older adults in most cases. The only way to replace ignorance is with better data, and the only way to work around stupidity is a lot of patient repetition of good data, in a variety of ways.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
What we really need to conquer is elitist bullshit like people thinking that half working cut rate versions of the laptop they use to search Wikipedia will finally impart knowledge of which water sources are polluted to poor Africans when 5,000 years of accomplished that taks 4,999 1/2 years ago. Same thing with crops.
When will you Westerners figure out that no matter how great you think you are the entire rest of the world does not have to learn to mimic you to survive. The problem in Africa isn't that your average tribesman is just too dumb to find water, it is that every untainted watering hole is guarded my men carrying rifles made in your country and shipped here by your government, standing at the ready to put a bullet in any head that isn't on their side. Their side being the side that will let Westerners pillage the country in return for more rifles to guard more water sources to kill by attrition anyone who isn't complicit in the scheme to carve up the entire world and hand it over to the West.
Keep your laptops.
When will you Westerners figure out that no matter how great you think you are the entire rest of the world does not have to learn to mimic you to survive
Yeah, and if we'd do nothing to help the "entire rest of the world" we'd be told that we're greedy and stingy. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I happen to like this method.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Speaking of which, the word processor is using a picture of a floppy disc to represent saving a file. Since a)The OLPC doesnt have a floppy disc and b)The target users may never have seen a floppy disc, they may need a new icon...
If I had access to two fully mobile people, the three of us would probably be able to get the disabled person out.
But your point is well taken.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
...because if you did you wouldn't have asked such a question:
So when was the last time you say a child use the family laptop for a soccer ball?
Never underestimate the destructive capacity of a three year old--especially a bored three year old. Angry three year olds are serious occupational hazards for hapless parents.
Perhaps the older children and adults that would be typical users wouldn't mistreat the machine like this, but these machines must survive households in developing nations, and I'm sure very many of them contain three year olds that are siblings and offspring of these users (and would be potential future users of the machine). A great deal of these families are of modest means as well and I'm sure they have to share close living quarters and have no place to keep the machine out of reach of the younger children. Perhaps the rather non-spherical OLPC unit wouldn't inspire toddlers to try using it as a soccer ball but I'm sure their fertile imaginations would come up with other means of destruction.
AH! So this is aimed at second world countries, not third world countries. You see, the name is confusing. It makes people think every child is going to get one. They should really change the name.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Wow, I haven't seen that much mystery meat navigation since I uninstalled that proprietary Flash garbage.
even so- rather than spend $X on this laptop project, why not take that same money and put it to countries that -don't- have the basics like food then? $208 per kid should cover a lot of food.
So the question is, what's more imporant- kids that barely have food get laptops (which is admittedly quite valuable for education purposes), or kids that have nothing get food.
Conceivably, the generation that get the laptops can then move on to feeding some of the ones that didn't get laptops, but meanwhile those people starve. So, do we enable more people to help others, at the cost of those starving today- or do we feed those starving today and then worry about educating them all once the basics are covered?
Most of those efforts are well-intentioned but misguided. Everyone feels bad for starving kids -- nobody gives a shit when the starving kid grows up to be an angry man with no opportunity other than waving an AK-47. Or an angry woman with a gaggle of kids that she can't feed.
But fortunately for do-gooders everywhere, the starving-kid-turned-militiaman or starving-kid-turned-rape-victim will father a few more starving kids to feed before dying or running away.
this hoary crap about the money being better spent on food for the starving kids etc. is being posted by microsoft employees and shills...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I watched these videos and thought "that seems too fast to be the $100 XO laptop." Found out it's an emulator, and you can download it and check it out too.
http://www.winbreak.com/olpc.htm
I found that interface to be almost sheer torture to look at. I can imagine what a child somewhere in the back woods of nowhere is going to think of it.
just imagine 20 years down the line when someone asks if they like linux and they are going to think back on that OLPC interface and state rather emphatically "I hated linux and that OLPC device I had".
talk about someone so in love with their own idea as to lose sight of the point of the project itself!
Understanding is much like a 3-edged-sword. in this: there are always 2 sides and the truth.
Speaking of which, the word processor is using a picture of a floppy disc to represent saving a file. Since a)The OLPC doesnt have a floppy disc and b)The target users may never have seen a floppy disc, they may need a new icon...
What's even more scary is that they didn't think to get rid of the out-dated "save file" metaphor. Why can't I just type stuff in and have it persist automatically? If I type over something, the computer should just remember what was there before and allow me to go back.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
These OLPC devices only have 640x480 resolution, the same as a pocket PC. If you can work with fullscreen applications on PDA or cellphone, then there is no reason why you should complain about OLPC's use of the same paradigm. OLPC is more like a PDA than a personal computer. It's just more rigged, and its architecture is open.
I once had a signature.
I see this excuse and scratch my head. I have seen some incredible GUI designs that fit onto a single floppy disc. Of particular note were the QNX distro (with a web browser to boot!) and GEO-works. Yes, that is a 1.44 MB floppy disc, not a CD-ROM even. I would dare say that if you can't get the UI honed into 2-4 MB, there is far too much cruft within the code base. The only possible exception would be to deal with CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) glyphs, but even that only should take up an additional 3-5 MB due to font issues.
128 MB is down right roommmmmmmy and is a problem only for those programmers who are just plain lazy to optimize their code, or a UI that is driven more by PR than by code doing what a UI is supposed to do: display information in a clean and unobstructed manner that the user can take advantage of. Even a secondary objective of being easy enough to use that a non-geek can understand how to access the information they need is also easily done. Buttons, spinners, edit and check boxes, and "movable windows" don't really take that much extra programming.
Just travel, see with your own eyes what happens outside the 1st World, meet people from other countries and you will agree that, even if it is a risky project, it has to be done. Reading about OLPC some African friends of mine come to my mind. - Kemi from Nigeria, she studied Accounts. In 2003 she had no job and she asked me for a laptop (that I couldn't afford) to install any account program to learn how they run. Finally she emigrated to London. Last news from her, were that she was working in a fast-food. - Evelyn from Ghana. She lives on the foot of Adaklu Mountain near Lake Volta in a small village without electricity power, she is the coordinator of a Eco-tourism project. When I met her in 2004 she had email address but she had to travel 50 kilometers to check her mailbox. - Hachir lives in Tunisia near the desert. He lives in a small village they have to pump water with an engine to get a shower. He has 2 kids of 6 and 7 years old. Why his kids will never have the opportunity to know what a word processor is? - Gracious from Wa in Ghana. He studies at the University in Kumasi. In September this year he also asked me how could he get a cheap PC to learn... It's obvious that there are priorities: to eat, to read but some of the children today will be the people that tomorrow will lead these countries and the more they know the better for everybody. Sorry for my English but it's not my mother tongue.
uh; I hate to break it to you, but they aren't pushing these to 2nd world countries. Second world was a phrase used during the cold war to refer to the communist block of countries. The first world was the free developed world, the 2nd world was the commies, and the 3rd world was everyone else. Since then there has been an expansion of the terms referring to fourth world countries as the absolutely poorest countries.
Please don't use terms when you don't know what they mean.
Phil
my point wasn't so much a point as it was a philosophical question to say that even if you're someone who thinks civilized countries should make it a point to feed everyone in the world that needs feeding, this laptop project might be a real step in that direction anyway- so if you're arguing to feed people first, this laptop project might make more working citizens (of any country) that might in turn (out of gratefulness or just intelligence) work on feeding those with truly nothing. There's a time lag involved, but ultimately, perhaps the laptop project is a greater good than feeding the poor directly?
Here is one for VMPlayer2 51
http://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/wordpress/?p=
The download issue that is discussed in the first few comments on that page has been resolved.
I had never seen anything about the OLPC GUI or how to use it before I ran this image. I figured it out pretty quickly, not sure how others would do in my situation, but once you figure it out it is quit nice.
I say, kudos to the designers! They couldn't have done a better job. As seen in the video, they have inserted the Squeak environment! This is a Smalltalk powered system.
if this is going to kids who have never owned a high tech portable equipment they must be quite durable.
And these constraints have also software requirements; given that this project is aimed to *children* and around the *whole world*, IMHO this decision is much better than including a UNIX terminal. An environment designed to be connected to Internet 100% of time won't do.
A computer that begins with a 'sandbox' operative system is great for beginners who must self-teach themselves (try learning a desktop without mouth-to-mouth training!). But this computer is not dumbed-down at all: in has a complete object-oriented development environment just one click away. Children can experiment and learn the basics of computing, without requiring access to online forums (which may not be available to them). Try learning to master the CLI without a LUG! With Smalltalk and the included games, they can tweak and experiment and build their own simulations.
I know that this environment works, because it's how learned computers myself. My old ZX-Spectrum fits into this kind of computer. In the early 80s there weren't available BBS at Europe, and the only way to learn computing was through monthly magazines, and programming our own games. I'm sure when this children grow up they will have the same fond memories of their OLPC laptop, as many of us have of our first micro computers.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
The concept of developing country assumes that these countries believe in evolution. I wonder how many great things the OLPC would do in Kansas..... Sorry, I had to.
Why? It's just something you learn, actually an icon of a floppy probably would not mean "save" to anyone - even if they saw a FD previously - until they have seen this exact use.
This is an absolutely small detail, kids will just learn it (as we did learn BASIC back in the day even though we did not speak English at all).
Real life is overrated.
In that case put a picture of a bunny in there.
I have a hunch that many adults will use these laptops. When they see the power of it, and when they have use for it, and especially when the children can help them using it, as their teachers...
I'm not sure that would be all that friendly to the flash drive.
And I don't see anything that indicate they don't support buttons, spinners, edit and check boxes and "movable windows". In fact, they use GTK, which would have given them all the GUI elements they need, and unless they're running X without a window manager they presumably have movable windows too.
I hope that teachers and educational institutions around the world take advantage of the availability of these machines after their introduction and can develop common curricula, translated to the appropriate language, to rapidly teach large regions of the world. It's much cheaper to send out one $100 laptop than it is to distribute dozens of books per child. It's also much easier to keep the curricula up-to-date, simply by updating the material, translating it once, and distributing it.
This opens up a lot of doors for educators to participate in "open source" teaching.
As an interactive designer I tend to think that GUI could be even more of a departure from current conventions. We're still introducing conventions and metaphors that will not be common to the people using those laptops.
That said, you really need to do ethnographic field research in order to develop a proper GUI. Considering that we still fight with antiquated counterintuitive 1970's UI conventions in the first world, despite being bombarded with technology, I can all but guarantee our conventions are not going to fly outside of our bubble. Especially for someone who has been raised to comprehend a completely different system of metaphor and visual communication.
No doubt, there is value to giving people access to our silly window / menu GUIs so they can learn how our GUIs work. However, access to our GUI conventions can't impair someone who rarely uses a computer and simply needs access to something like vital medical information.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Hi Guys,
The "floppy disk" icon has been changed in the latest build to a much prettier and larger tango icon.
The word processor activity will continue to evolve. Our latest code has the AbiWord canvas widget embedded in python.
We can make the interface exactly what is wanted with that. Customization per country is also easy.
Martin Sevior
AbiWord core hacker
Maybe it's just me, but I always had multiple assignments in school. I'd rather not try to keep typing notes at the bottom of my paper on my country's history.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the One Laptop Per Child would be better served if the OS running that laptop was GEOS (renamed Geoworks, renamed NewDeal, renamed Breadbox)... Then the OLPC machine would really be the C=64 of it's generation and bring computing to millions who never had it before.
It seems to me that Commodore had it "right" from the start, making a low-cost, simple to use, easy to operate, durable, hackable, expandable system that started off as a toy and had nearly unlimited potential to be a serious computer.
If it were me, I'd just take the guts of the C=64, condense it down to a few small chips, make it run off batteries/solar power/handcrank, add some flash storage and a few other goodies, internet capability, and have the whole thing run GEOS. And you could make that for well under $100 and still make a profit doing it, as the C=64 gamestick sold 2 Xmas's ago for, like $20 a pop, and that probably had more usefulness than that un-usable laptop concept.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Despots have a longer history of ruining peoples lives then technology. Technology doesn't kill people, People kill people. Gotta love not holding people responsible for their actions and instead blaming some concept or object.
Yes, and it's now used to describe "developing" countries (developing being the PC term). The 1st world is the industrialised countries, the second is developing and the third is undeveloped. Just because you happen to only hear the PC words doesn't mean the others are wrong. Words can change meanings you know, for example, "bugs" meaning flaws (in code) originally came from an early computers collapsing because a bug was quite literally eating it. Now, it just means flaws (usually in code) and has nothing to do with a moth's brunch.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
They may also be kicked around, like soccer balls, a popular sport in 99.9 percent of the world.
In 90 percent of the world, this is also called football..
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Do you realise that the OLPC project is suggestion governments spend >USD100 on each child in potentially poverty stricken communities with no electricity? How can the expense be truly justified, for what use is a shiny new laptop to a starving child other than a bartering chip? Did the OLPC founders know that there were serious viability issues with the project? WARNING: Conspiracy theory ahead Yes, they have sapped thousands of hours of free community based expertise to buil a potentially very successful childrens laptop suitable for general retail. I'm just waiting for one of them to split and take the profit.
If you'd like to see the UI video at full resolution, head over to http://www.90percentofeverything.com/. There were a couple of inaccuracies in the video I should point out. The web browser is not firefox, it is (apparently) "Dillo" - http://www.dillo.org/. Also, the title bar area doubles up as the address bar.
They could borrow the system used in image-based persistent environments like Squeak, where in-progress changes are saved automatically as part of the system image. In Squeak (and Smalltalk in general) you can use a "FileOut" operation to save a snapshot of a particular class or method as a regular file. In a "live" editor the actual document, with all its state information and version history, would be persistent in the device (no "save" operation, and perhaps not even an explicit file format, just a collection of in-memory objects), but whenever you feel like reading it elsewhere you could export a snapshot of the current version to the flash drive (or to anything else capable of receiving a binary stream).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat