Other ideas
Other Ideas
Other ideas, not specifically for hardware or software of the laptop itself:
Low-cost Graphing Calculators
Starting this year in schools across the world, the use of graphing calculators is being incorporated into the education syllabus of mathematic subjects such as algebra, trigonometry and calculus. Graphing calculators are more expensive than the already costly scientific calculators. And this has raised issues of costs and funding, as well as the logic of burdening students with a US$100 device that's never use after a semester/term. One idea is to put software-based graphing calculators into entry-level/used mobile phones. For example: Tea Vui Huang's TVH-72g Graphing Calculator for mobile phones. Ref: One Graphing Calculator Per Student
UMPC
I think the function of OLPC and UMPC should be the same, right?
Wireless Networking
A book called Wireless Networking in the Developing World is now available on the net in pdf at http://wndw.net/. It has a lot of information that might be useful when deploying the OLPC program. In addition to covering WIFI theory and design, it covers practical, social, and economic problems that they encountered. One idea is to share the cost of the infrastructure with other local groups like businesses and local government. Another is to disperse the knowledge of how to operate the system so that if one person moves away, critical knowledge isn't lost.
Wireless Thin-Client as alternative?
The main counter argument for a thin-client approach is probably the need for maintenance/administration and general dependency on the central server, think e.g. particularly power in this context?
Still, maybe providing a (much) cheaper wireless portable thin client (think one-chip LCD+wireless controller; nothing else inside, particularly no memory and real CPU, which are probably the next most expensive part after the display?), for say $20 instead of $100, plus a commoditized say $1000 Dual-CPU with 2 GB RAM server, per school/entire village, could of interest in some situations? This is assuming that the configuration and loaded software etc. of all devices would be very homogenous, which is probably a fair assumption in this context? If the server could run say 100 clients (essentially running very similar software to what was built for the full $100 laptop of 128 MB RAM each, but with all of the OS and application code shared, thus only using about 16-32 MB for per-client data) then this seems at least imaginable, and would mean a total cost of just $3000 instead of $10'000 - for the 100 children.
That's a lot of ifs and assumptions of course, and only real pricing, scalability and the "market" can tell if there was an interest for (also) providing this - later. Just an idea, really.
- It's a good idea, Ndiyo is doing just that right NOW. Except, because you're tied to the server there's no need to use complex wireless network technology. Also as you say the server is tied to a reliable power source; e.g. at least diesel generator which means the machines are only of use in a classroom or office. The prices are high at the moment, compared to olpc targets, but the boxes aren't being mass produced yet. 62.252.0.11 01:55, 18 March 2006 (EST)
Development Process
How much coordination of the Software Development Process is useful? Just make an SDK available and hope for self-organization? Or maybe e.g. a registry of suggested/needed software, a forum to coordinate software development between parties using this. Or how about volunteer summer projects for CS university students, like Google's summer of code thing?
User interface
Get John Maeda involved with the UI and other design elements.
Ergonomics for the hand-crank handle is not there. I believe Oval is good, even better is a triangular shape with rounded edges. Rectangular shape fits the profile of the computer well, however, with hand crank being one of the most used and stressed portion of the laptop, minimizing unnatural gripping forces to be applied to the handle may increase the life of the handle and improve ergonomics at the same time. By M. Harada Buford, GA
Sell them! Make them a symbol of global activism
Sell in open market and use royalty to fund free laptops to poor children: I don't understand why OLPC doesn't want to sell in open markets, and why the manufacturing contract has to be exclusive to specific manufacturer(s). By doing this, OLPC is not unleashing the power of the markets. Such a sound concept as $100 laptop, when complemented by the market, will work exponentially well. I suggest a system where the design is made close to open source, and any manufacturer can use the design, and they can make improvements. However, the manufacturers should agree to submit any design or function improvements to the MediaLabs, in return for the original design. The MediaLabs should collect royalty as a percentage of sales, and use it to fund free or subsidized laptops for children of poor countries. [1]
-- Subhas Chilumula, Rutherford, NJ, USA.
I suggest that the decision not to sell these to the general public be reconsidered. Sales of these laptops could help fund their global (charitable) distribution. For a purchase price of $200, consumers would actually be buying two computers - one to own/use and one for a needy child somewhere in the world. Among first world consumers, these laptops could become quite popular as a meaningful symbol of global activism. Widespread usage of the devices would, in turn, fuel innovation, enhance infrastructure and make the devices that much more useful to the global community for which they were originally intended.
-- suggested by Don Ferris, San Diego, CA
Terrific idea! I'd buy one for $200 in a minute. If this idea could be more widely floated (Tim O'Reilly, you listening?), I'm sure the response would be very strong.
-- Tim Lynch, T-burg, NY
I had this same idea this morning while listening to the NPR story about the laptop program. I could easily see buying one at $200 with the knowledge that I was also buying another for a child elsewhere. The one hole that I see in the current plan is that marketing these commercially in the U.S. and other well developed countries wouldn't be enough. I think that to really give the program a chance a rollout within the poor in the U.S./Europe would give a big boost in cost reduction (more laptops less cost) and it would provide for greater addoption and awareness. There are plenty of places within the U.S. and Europe that could benefit from a program like this.
--Nick Acks, Baltimore, MD
I came here to submit exactly this idea. Pay two, get one!
I feel it is important that the OLPC hardware is freely available on the market at low price. If not there will immediately a black market being established, where the hardware is sold at much more than 200$.
The OLPC Laptop can be more than consumer electronics. It serves very well as client device for distributed applications even in large companies or public institutions. I were proud to deliver those applications to my customers.
-- Dominik Dahl, Tunisia
Same idea... With a twist. Make an open market version to distinguish it from the OLPC version so that when an OLPC computer DOES come up on an auction site it is immediately recognizable as such. The last I saw the OLPC unit cost was running around $138. Make the open market version $500 and put a couple of SDIO or CF slots on it in place of one of the USB ports. 802.11g and blueetooth would turn it into a device that can connect right in my world. I have been actively looking for a rugged thin client computer with no moving parts. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Keep the hand crank. It is an asset, not a liability.
-- Mark Stewart, Omaha, NE
Agree with all posters above. Demand for the laptop in affluent parts of the world will be huge too, because, lets face it, we are addicted to gadgets, and this is the coolest one to come along since the powerbook. This demand is a double edged sword though. Buy 2 (or more! I'd pay $300+ for this) get 1 is a great concept, but what if demand from the affluent outstrips supply? the "black" (I prefer the word open - the first world have been trying to smash the concept of democracy/free trade into the heads of the third world for centuries now, they can't rightly turn around and complain, using the sinister term "black" market when the third world finally does exactly what they have been suggesting all this time) market scenario is, unfortuntely, a highly plausible one. On the other hand, a larger user base of developers would mature the software platform faster, and if the laptop does eventually get connected to backbone "in the wild" instead of just a local ad hoc network, knowledge transfer can happen in a more open way.
-- Ben Tobias, Australia
Social Context
Remember that most of the african countries have not yet been involved in the project.
The targeted community is very very far from being basic computer users. Start distributing devices first to those who already know the concept of a computer; students, public administration, companies administration. One Laptop per Child is the final goal, not the first step.
The whole concept need to be seen in the context of how networking and distribution of data is going to be performed. In the poorest countries, the ideas may need to be modified due to limited scope for immediate networking.
The role of charity will be a major driving force in distributing the hardware to the poorest individuals. Small companies and public institutions even in poor countries are capable of buying basic hardware.
For adults, with limited postal service or reliability, a major application of importance would be political and private communications. To provide privacy and delivery certification a publik key infrastructure is required. In some targeted countries authority wants to read, manipulate or intercept any communication. A policy is needed to cooperate with such authorities: Either not introduce means of communications in these areas or provide authorities with read/write access to all communications.
There will immedately established a black market where OLPC devices are sold. That means these devices will be valuable, even if they are given for free. Consequences are: widespread corruptions, laptops illegaly sold by schools to parents, laptops sold by parents. People express their "rights" to sell what is "given" to them. And the worst: Children robbed or otherwise forced to hand over the hardware. Think about the consequences, when providing value to the weakest. To assure the flawless implementation of this project first eliminate black market by establishing a legal market. Enforcements about buying/ownership or that only those appropriate could carry/operate will be overcome by criminals.
Distribution of Data and Software
Data and software distribution could be a commercial venture for a dweller with transport. Western charity could provide data transfer credits to individuals in remote villages, to be spent on delivery to and from the village. A courier would have a laptop with large storage expansion, and travel to villages to deliver data designated for them, and to recieve data for delivery from them. They would expend their credits in the process of givig their data transmission, and recieve a secure reciept for their last communications sent from the data courier. When the courier returned to the city, they would access the internet via a larger access point if available, or just by telephone if not, and would load the appropriate requested data from several repositories of information - e.g. encyclopedia (possibly wikipedia), educational syllabus for the next month or year as developed by national education system, etc. The delivery of the data would be accompanied by a cashing in of the data-transfer-credits collected on their journy around the villages, and converted to cedits for cashing at a bank, or directly at the internet access point if appropriate. Email based securely encoded credits designated for the individuals in villages as charity gifts would then be recieved from the internet and delivered by the courier to the village on their next visit. To prevent ransom of the delivery of the credits, the entire collection of data intended for the village would be bound in to a 'delivery package' only decodable and seperatable by the intended recipient and then distributed to the individuals by a simple username and password (the username selected from a village specific list, to avoid confusion). With funding of data distribution by digitally secure credits or tokens delivered securely to villagers, access to data by the holders of the laptop can be guaranteed.
Access to personal data must be able to protected, by user/password encoded access only, also for deleting data - there should be a firmware controlled partition or directory on the flash which can only be accessed by users' passwords, or deleted in its entirety (not per user) - also there should be a limit on the space used by each user. There should be a hardware switch for deactivating wifi if installed, to prevent hackers and viruses in potentially unstable political climate - likely used to prevent political dissent.
-- suggested by ma http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/User:Ma
==SHARED LINUX DISTRIBUTION ACCESS A full linux distribution of 14 CD-ROMs will not fit on a single OLPC laptop with only 512MB non-volatile storage, but it will fit on 100 laptops. If each laptop dedicates 18% of it's non-volatile storage to public wireless access, then 100 laptops each within wireless range of each other at a school can have access to a full linux distribution.
To handle situations where not all 100 laptops are at a school at the same time, the package file could be striped across multiple laptops using RAID 5. If a particular package file is located on 10 laptops and one is missing the others will use checksums to replace the missing data.
Each OLPC laptop could have: A basic set of applications. Access to use or install any package contained on the distributed wireless public storage while at school. Favorite applications cached locally on laptop.
-- TMJ
Ready Operating Systems
One of our Puppys drew me to this http://news.com.com/2100-7346_3-6057456.html
We can have Puppy Linux running on your laptop before other distros have designed their latest hat
Puppy installs anywhere... http://www.puppylinux.org/
=====
Contact
Main developer Barry Kauler, P.O. Box 359, Perenjori, WA 6620, Australia
On line contact http://www.puppylinux.org/user/contact.php
Publicity officer ed.jason@gmail.com
=======
OLPC friendly sites
Considering that these laptops are going to access the web, it might be beneficial to encourage webmasters to make their sites look good when viewed with a laptop display set to the color mode on 640x480 resolution. Most of the sites today have been made to work with 800x600 resolution or higher which may present a bit of a problem when people start surfing these sites with the color mode switched on in these laptops.
One way webmasters can do it is to just make their sites look good and scale well to 640x480 view, but if that is not feasible then an alternative approach is to design an alternative version of sites design/layout that will be automatically switched once the site detects an OLPC laptop or otherwise if laptop detects the availability of the OLPC compliant version of site design. This detection system should yet be devised.
One way is to tune the preinstalled version of firefox to emit a special user agent id which can then be detected by websites so they know they need to switch to an olpc friendly version.
Another way may be to use firefox greasmonkey extension and have webmasters make scripts that transform their sites into a friendly version. This has been suggested by "TD" on an #olpc freenode IRC channel (to give a credit:). Scripts would then be stored in a central location and invoked by the greasmonkey extension. As new scripts become available on a central server the extension in a browser would automatically add them to its list so that they are applied. It shouldn't be hard to modify the extension to allow for that. This however has a drawback of requiring more processing on part of the client laptop which is something we want to prevent, but the concept could still be something to build on.
I have experimented a bit with this and was able to create a friendlier theme for my site (which is a portal so it is rather challenging). Changes I made would probably easily be convertible to the greasmonkey script.
I have proposed a project around this idea at Libervis.com (which is a site I mentioned above) and there was some discussion that might be found useful. If anyone picks this up as something worth considering and wants to for some reason get in touch with me feel free to drop me a line there. Just use the contact form. :) If I can help in some way, or anyone from libervis community, feel free to make a suggestion.
Thank you
Danijel Orsolic
Rollout and Community Building
> Other topics where we could use some ideas is in regard to rollout and community building.
The eutotokens of learning
Some years ago I tried writing some science fiction, science fiction in the tradition of putting forward ideas for the future in a story setting which could potentially work.
Most of what I produced is on the web.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0000.htm
The items on the web are from 1997 and 1998 and time has passed since then. Some of the basic ideas in the stories are quite possibly entirely different from what is intended for this laptop project: for example, learning packages funded by advertising revenue, though the problems that that mode of working produces in the story might be of interest. So, I am mentioning the story here not as the definitive way to produce community building yet in the hope that maybe some of the ideas might be helpful in devising an opportunity creating infrastructure.
William Overington
15 March 2006
Common Rooms idea
Note that there are several common mechanisms for "supporting" internationalization and localization; the most common being gettext, which makes use of template files. We are looking into the use of an emerging standard, xliff, that supports more than just translation of strings and is generally both more robust and extensible. Of course, all of this presumes that there is someone to do the trsanslation or localization of images, etc. --Walter
When you refer to the localization of images, what does that mean please?
For example, if someone authors some learning material in English, and the laptop project wants copies in, say, Spanish and Portuguese, does localization of images refer to all images or only those where there is some text in the image?
Would use of the full stop lock and key technique in the following article help, with an initial master diagram, with no text upon it, being prepared and then the English version as a layout example.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04100.htm
The Spanish and Portuguese versions of the text could be supplied in text files and someone skilled in preparing images, though not necessarily a linguist, could use the master diagram and the text from a text file, and, guided by the layout example, produce a localized image.
If someone wanted that done, the request could be made in the Artwork Common Room.
However, I am wondering whether I am missing something here and wonder whether localization of images implies more, even perhaps far more, than what the above suggestion would provide.
In relation to the localization of images, could someone possibly supply an example image and such other information as is necessary (for example, some text in two or more languages) for someone who is learning the system to try localizing please? That could perhaps be a valuable learning experience in trying to build an infrastructure of how learning material authors, people doing translations and people who can produce images can interact so as to produce learning material localized into a number of languages.
The following article could perhaps help with some characters, such as those from Unicode code points of U+0100 and greater.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pai04200.htm
William Overington
28 March 2006
Localization Common Room idea
Suppose that someone, whose native language is English, is interested in producing learning material which could be used on the laptop in various countries once that learning material is localized into the local language, yet that person knows only a little of languages. There are many languages into which content would need to be localized.
In that one needs to start somewhere I have thought that an approach which might be worth trying, in the context of rollout and community building, would be to have such pages in this wiki as a "Common Room" type environment where people who can write in at least one of English, Spanish and Portuguese and people who can write in two or more of those languages, can interact and observe what happens.
For example, there are various language translation packages, both as programs for PCs and as web utilities. Yet what is the quality of translation? Can a system evolve whereby someone can, say, prepare something in English and then it be machine translated into, say, Spanish, then both the original and the clearly designated machine translated version placed in the Localization Common Room and then maybe someone who knows Spanish can read it through and correct it as necessary and comment?
This may or may not be workable in practice. If it is workable, then maybe it could be part of the community building infrastructure.
William Overington
24 March 2006
English, Portuguese and Spanish Localization Common Room
Here is a link to such a Localization Common Room and we can observe what, if anything, happens with it.
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/English_Portuguese_and_Spanish_Localization_Common_Room
Artwork Common Room idea
How about a place where a learning material author who needs an illustration file to include in a document which he or she is authoring can go and request that such an illustration be produced.
People interested in the laptop project who are not learning material authors yet who are interested in producing illustrations to support learning material authored by others could also go there and find a project.
Artwork Common Room
Here is a link to such an Artwork Common Room and we can observe what, if anything, happens with it.
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/Artwork_Common_Room
Company Sponsored Software/Other Creative Projects Writing Scheme
small entries, the best of which win small monetary prizes, after all that is what the majority of people work for, its not for the love. This would have two effects it would get company's interested in the project and the students who are learning to use these laptops. It would show these students and their families the direct relation between them learning IT and other skills and the outside world.