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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."
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.
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.
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>
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'
You want to feed them fish , OLPC is trying to teach the coming generation how to fish.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
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.
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.
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
And how are you "wasting your money on other people" seeing as the countries who want this will pay for it themselves?
Why is the GUI non-standard?
Because all the existing GUIs in the world today --- including System 6 --- are overweight, overcomplicated, way more powerful than are needed, fiddly, baroque, inconsistent, difficult to use, difficult to learn, and in fact are downright scary to people who aren't accustomed to computers.
KDE, Gnome, Windows, OSX, etc are all completely inappropriate for a machine of this nature.
(In fact, I still think they have a lot of work to do. The relationship between activities isn't particularly clear. Some applications, such as the word processor, still use popup menus, which is very bad. Etoys --- that's Squeak, isn't it? --- is visually inconsistent with the rest of the system. But at least they're heading in the right direction.)
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.
There, said it. :(
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!
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
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...
Family laptops are bigger [e.g. what we're used to], usually kept safe by the adults. These are smaller and meant to be used solely by kids.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I've seen people do stupider things to their computers and bring them in to have them fixed and I live in the 'brilliant' USA...
A lady brought in her favorite keyboard, wanted it repaired. Did not want a replacement, as she only liked that keyboard. The keyboard's problems were two fold:
a: Her daughter had taken it out back and used it for a rousing pickup game of baseball (as the bat)
b: her daughter had found the cord to be a nuicance and cut it off with a pair of scissors.
I've had SEVERAL machines come in with the VGA connector pulled off the motherboard when people try to detach the screwed on cable without unscrewing it first.
I had a business owner carefully disassemble his hard drive and bring in the platers in a zip lock baggie because we told him if he brought in his harddrive we might be able to recover the data (the drive had not been dead, just generating a lot of errors when he replaced it.) He needed the data on the drive for a tax audit begining at 8am the next morning.
I often talk to people who can't get something to work primarily because it isn't plugged in. For example, no dialtone on the modem because there is no phone line hooked to the computer. No video signal because the monitor is not hooked up to anything (there are no cables coming off of the monitor at all... heard that more than once... that's because you didn't hook the cables too the monitor that came with it).
Printers regularly get sprayed with WD-40.
A customer took a wireless router from us and wanted to mount it on the wall, so he drilled two holes through the middle of the router and screwed it to the wall. Then expected a refund when it didn't work. Another tech tells me a tale of someone drilling a hole through their LCD display to mount it on the wall, but I'm not sure I believe that.
We had a laptop back there last week which had several muddy boot prints on both top and bottom, and numerous dings where it obviously got tossed around. According to the bringer, it's their son's laptop and he just brings it in from college, tosses it on the floor, and regularly walks on it.
We had a customer that bought several of those 'small' Dell computers (business machines that are small tower/desktop units... bookshelf style I think they are called) in a row. They were the cheapest thing dell was selling in the line, and came with about a 60 day warranty. The all died in less than 6 months. The customer was putting the Pentium 4 computers in a desk drawer and then piling papers on top of them. I've also had a customer use their computer to block a heating vent in the winter because they didn't like the warm air blowing directly upon them.
I've had people cut the wires on their fans because they didn't like the noise (or even better, jam them with a stick).
Someone whittled down the power connector to plug in a new hard drive because it didn't fit (had it upside down) and killed the drive.
A supposed A+ certied tech brought us 5 machines he was building. He had tried to hammer the processors into their sockets (he hadn't pulled the lever up).
And finally, I worked on an Amiga 500 once that had no keyboard... just the membrane pad underneath it with letters marked on it with a sharpie. Upon opening it there were about 500 22 gauge wires inside. Why? because the owner had physically picked the machine up and thrown it across the room where it hit the doorframe, destroyed the keyboard and physically broke the motherboard in half. I was just adding memory to it, at the time (a year or two after the breakage) it was actually working.
Actually, as a college student, I think it would be pretty handy to have one of these myself... Assuming whatever they use as a power source isn't noisy, how cool would it be to be able to take notes in class all day long (I can type faster than I can write) without having to monitor your battery, carry multiple notebooks, etc etc? I'm also a bit older than your average college student, I have a house, yard, garage 45 miles from the university that I drive each direction every day. I can't just "run back to the dorm" to type up a paper. Perhaps not as a main system, but something I can throw in my backpack that is rugged, cheap, purposeful, wifi connectivity, unlimited runtime.... I could use that. Granted I can carry the AC adapter around for the laptop I have now, but that severly limits where and when I can use it before my battery runs out.
I may have to share this planet with animals, but I'm doing my damn best to eat every last one of them.
I do have kids and I came from a large family. I guess we are just better behaved.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
While the low price is a plus for me, I'd personally buy one of the OLPC laptops for durability and power consumption reasons. This laptop is designed to withstand some pretty serious abuse. The $250 laptops from Best Buy aren't nearly as hardened. This laptop actually has to have a decent battery life. The cheapo ones from Best Buy do not.
In fact, the only other "hardened" notebooks I can think of are high-end Thinkpads and Panasonic Toughbooks. I challenge you to find me one of those for $250.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
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!"