Other ideas

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Other Ideas

Other ideas, not specifically for hardware or software of the laptop itself:

VoIP

Although the basic technology of the laptop would be capable of some type of VoIP such as the Gizmo project for Linux, the network infrastructure needed for voice will not exist. In addition, it is cheaper to deploy cellular telephony infrastructure than it is to deploy the wireline infrastructure that Internet services ride on. There could very well be voice recording applications such as OGG but it is more likely to be used to create sound files which are emailed or used locally in the village. For instance, if a pupil is sick, a teacher could record some part of a lesson, then visit the pupil briefly at home to transfer the OGG file to their laptop. One wonders why western school systems do not leverage the Internet in this way.

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

There is a Python graphing calculator at http://www.netwood.net/usr/jessw/graphing_calc-1.1.zip

There is also a library named PyChart that could be adapted by stripping it down to an SVG-only version.

UMPC

I think the function of OLPC and UMPC should be the same, right?

There is no relationship between the two concepts. The UMPC is a consumer device targetted at affluent western customers. The OLPC is a minimal rugged laptop targetted at poor underprivileged children in developing regions of the globe. The OLPC is primarily intended to deliver educational content and experiences to kids.

Read the constructionist educational philosophy of Seymour Papert to understand where the OLPC comes from.

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?

There are a whole bunch of projects in OLPC Google Summer of Code. In addition, the OLPC Python Environment and Sugar are documented and available.

User interface

Get John Maeda involved with the UI and other design elements.

Why? Who is he?

Physical USB Stick data transport

Some villages don't have telephone or other networks and will not have that for years. People are traveling to markets and commute to work, public busses and other scheduled vehicle reach more villages than the internet does it now. The Motoman project in Cambodia leverages this.

There should be a possibility to send and receive email using a village based server. There should be a easy to handle mechanism to transport email messages using a USB stick that travels in the pocket of someones trousers. Plug an USB stick into the village server, transport it to a village with internet and plug it in to an other server should be enough.

A more difficult project would be to send the email data to a passing public bus via WLAN. A vehicle can make to connection between an WLAN island and an WLAN connected to the internet.

Databus

The ping is horrible but 1 GByte per day is possible ;-)

Weekly or even daily software updates and bidirectional wikipedia updates could also made by USB in nearly every place - if the software can do that.

It turns out that there are existing programs that could support this. Years ago most email was sent via modems that only dialed once a day, so programs like "uucp" and "fetchmail" were created and might be useful for these purposes. I understand that in Africa "FIDOnet" is still running. "rsync" makes it easier to only copy changes, and it has advanced options that could help too. -- David A. Wheeler

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.

  • (Is this serious? Linux mini-distributions such as PuppyLinux, Damnsmalllinux and Austrumi are only 50-60 MB compressed and no larger than 200 MB uncompressed, but are very functional distros.)

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. -- (addition here by User:Ma) -- I would suggest that a new redundant storage system be developed for this purpose, with specific allocation of storage for this application, if it were considered a useful feature.

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


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's

Danijel Orsolic


Buy One, Give One Free

When a first-world consumer buys a laptop, they buy one for a third-worlder and they become ePen/eMail pals.

More disscussion of selling, commercial model and such have been moved to Not for individual sale

Wonderful Idea But Long-Term Support Needed

Having worked in Africa for several years and seen many, many "donation" programs fail due to lack of service, support and follow up, I must suggest that this program will not work unless there is a commitment to long-term support of each laptop. Here's an example: a brand-new x-ray machine donated by the Japanese government after much hoopla and press sat useless for 10 years after an easily repairable part broke and there was no money to fix it. If laptops are going to be donated, there needs to be thought put into what happens when something goes wrong with them. It would be a shame to see thousands of laptops sitting useless once something goes wrong with them. Service programs must be included in any equipment donation if the program is to have long-term sustainability.

Laura Hendrix

lhamilton_114@hotmail.com

This is an important suggestion. How can this service programme be realized? The topic needs its own page.

Laptop Service Programme Ideas

Rollout and Community Building

Rollout and Community Building Ideas are now in their own page.

Rollout and Community Building Ideas


More ideas

Here are a few more ideas: --ArnoldReinhold 09:21, 25 May 2006 (EDT)

Low voltage infrastructure

The power connector should be widely available, allowing connections to a variety of low voltage devices. I believe there are other projects promoting low-voltage, high efficiency lighting for the third world. These systems might be a source of laptop power.

There are two such connectors on the laptop. One is where the power generator plugs in to recharge the batteries. Obviously you could use the generator to power other things as well. The other such connection is called a USB port. One of the gadgets that you will find in computer stores is a light that plugs into the USB port.

Reuse of dead car batteries

Related to the above, it is my understanding that most 12 Volt vehicle battery failures involve a short circuit in a single cell, reducing the total voltage at full charge to a bit over 10 V. Such batteries should still be able to power the lap top and could be charged by solar cells or a manual generator. They could even be placed in a car or truck and charged from a cigar lighter adaptor during work trips. A discarded vehicle battery should be able to run an OLPC machine for a few days after a full charge.

Now that is a prime topic for an e-book to be distributed with the OLPC. Some guy will take his kid's generator, adapt it to water buffalo power and use the beast to charge up car batteries for a fee.

USB devices

It might be worthwhile to develop educational USB devices. One possibility would be a simple A/D converter with some sensors (temp, light, humidity, acceleration, etc). and input conditioning circuits. This would convert the laptop into a measurement device. With some software, it could be used as the basis for numerous science labs. It could also aid in repairing other laptops. Of course, such a device could be used with any USB-equipped computer.

Moved some bits to Hardware Ideas - Broadcasting

Start collecting USB memory sticks

Smaller USB memory sticks are becoming obsolete as flash memory prices drop. It might make sense to start collecting them for eventual distribution with the laptops. They don't take up much space.

THE MILLENNIUM GIFT ETHIOPIA

The discussion is moved to OLPC ethiopia

Ethiopia የሺህ ዓመት ስጦታ ኢትዮጵያ

  1. Poorest country in the world
  2. Lowest computer penetration in the world
  3. Lowest Internet and mobile penetration in the world
  4. Uses unique alphabet
  5. Uses unique calendar
  • which needs some amount of development investment by software companies. The likely hood of that happening is slim due to problem no1 above. No one would invest on a market that has no money.

Even if computers trickle in to Ethiopia some how (which is not happening) they are of no use for an ordinary Ethiopian child who do not understand much English. The software companies will not be rushing to build computers for Ethiopian children since there will not be money in it. The present system is condemns every Ethiopian child to computer darkness, for forseeable future.

light in the tunnel

But we are in a very unique time, and opportunity has presented itself to change all this. For those who do not know, at the moment the calender year in Ethiopia is 1998. The Ethiopian millennium comes on September 11th 2008. (Don’t mind the date. You cannot imagine how painful for Ethiopians that dreadful day was.) That means the Ethiopian Millennium is going to be in about one and half year from now. And there are about 1.5 million Ethiopians living abroad. Most of those Ethiopians are educated and could help in many ways. Out of those Ethiopians with the most conservative estimate about 100 000 will be celebrating the Ethiopian millennium in Ethiopia.

What The Millennium Gift Project does?

The millennium gift project for the next one and half year prepares a gift of one laptop computer by one travelling Ethiopian for one Ethiopian child to be presented for the millennium celebration.

This project organizes a massive localization and translation project with the participation of all capable Ethiopians, free and open source software developers, institutions such as universities and colleges. Helping with organizing, coding, translating, identifying recipients and donors and contributing money.

The software’s to be localized and translated to at least one Ethiopian language are

Hardware

Recipients

  • Schools
  • Classes
  • Students

Teferra 05:12, 27 May 2006 (EDT)

External link

Here is a link to a webspace about Ethiopian computing.

http://www.geez.org/

Ethiopic page in this wiki

OLPC Ethiopia page in this wiki

The addition of the OLPC Ethiopia page has not been done by the management. It is simply another member of the community adding the page so that you have somewhere to place more information in the hope that it helps your campaign.

Which languages or languages are to be used?

Which languages or languages are to be used?

Do they all use the Ethiopic script?

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