XO
Laptop
yesterday evening and have been fiddling with it for it hours. I'm
very pleased and impressed with the design and believe that the XO
will deliver on OLPC's vision of bringing computer literacy to, and
unleashing creativity in, the children of the developing world.
Actually I'm convinced it will do that for more folks than just
them!
I did take some pictures of course, but I'll point you to some videos that do a better job of introducing the XO:
Sugar is the XO's desktop GUI.
It is very good and has some excellent innovations. Three of the
elements that stand out are visual map of the mesh network neighborhood, visual map of running applications (the "activities" in the circle are
running, as opposed to the menu bar on the bottom which are those
that can be launched), and, most importantly IMO, the activity-centric
Journal
(rather than the expired files-and-folders desktop metaphor).
Having a task-oriented organization scheme is something I've been
wanting/expecting in Mac OS for twenty years, perhaps now it'll
happen when the Apple folks see they've been scooped in UI design
by a Linux machine with 128MB of RAM (it's 1984
all over again!). Of course Genius Folders will be
a dandy enhancement to the Journal's tagging scheme.
For young children the XO is probably darn near perfect. The
built-in
tools
(writing, music, chat, web browser, video, graphics, data recorder,
and calculator) and games are the obvious starting point. For real
computer powered creativity it has an impressive set of easy-to-use
programming tools. Python is the XO's primary scripting language
and the Pippy and Develop (Activity-building Activity) IDEs are a natural progression
from EToys (a LOGO-like environment
in Squeak/Smalltalk) and Turtle
Art visual
programming activities.
Some obvious low-hanging fruit for making the XO a vehicle for
teaching older children and young adults is packaging eBooks and on-line course material from sources like Project Guttenberg, MIT
OpenCourseWare, and Stanford on iTunes
U. I see a
flourishing library system of SD cards and USB memories. Naturally
the same materials would work dandy on the Sony and Amazon eBook
readers. Somewhat more challenging (but of personal interest to me)
is a web newsfeed system to replace my newspaper subscription.
Java-oriented folks will of course be disappointed that XO
doesn't normally support Java, but being a resource-constrained
platform that is pretty much unavoidable (Microsoft has been making
the same whine wrt Windows on XO). While there has been some work
done to make Java available on
XO
including a JNLP handler, I think a more useful approach would be
Google
Android for
XO. And I'm sure Gosling would agree since it is his opinion that
the PC for the developing world is the cell phone and that the OLPC
Project is bad idea.
Another idea for developers I have is porting Sugar to the
Nokia
N800/N810
which have specifications that are similar to the XO (actually
they're a bit slower and ARM-powered but the memory and display
sizes are quite close). There is some discussion about Sugar and Nokia's Maemo but there doesn't seem to
be any indication of a port in progress.
There is still time to participate in Give
One Get One
as the deadline was extended to December 31st, so if you haven't
ordered yours yet please do it now! Not only do you get a tax
deduction for the donated XO, you also get a year of T-Mobile WiFi which covers a lot of places including a zillion
Starbucks.
When you do get your XO Laptop, please let me know as I'm interested in meeting up with other OLPC-minded folks.
Off-the-shelf components are available to do it with moderate cost:
 |
The Feds are on the hydrogen bandwagon: http://hydrogen.energy.gov/
Honda is moving the FCX to production: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/10/hondas_more_pow.html
Some high school students in Arizona made a solar hydrogen truck
for $10K: http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage1259.html
Another news page: http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/Hydrogen/index.html
Green RV
I need to set up a pahe & category for Green RV technology. But in the meantime I'll comment on the Solar Unicat post.This AutoBlogGreen item illustrates movement in the right
direction: Ford Airstream concept: a shiny, hydrogen-powered PHEV
funmobile.
Not nearly as exciting as the Solar Unicat extreme Green RV
concept, but a clear indication we're getting there.
--Jim White, 26-Jan-2007
What happened to the listing for the other entry?
Can we have nested/Wiki Page in a Folder
?
No. Those are treated as attachments.
I've been working on implementing Wiki Publishing for
this web site (based on JSPWiki), and so haven't put any
content here yet. Over the next several weeks I'll be filling in
some details as I prepare for my Presentation Introducing IFCX at the July LAJUG
.
If you're the sort who just can't wait to find out what this all about, you can check out my little talk at the end of last week's OCJUG meeting on Google Video. My intention was to give a little 10 to 15 minute sneak peek on GWT and the start of an IFCX Builder for it. That's basically what I did, but it ran rather long...
Check out the next entry for the announcement with the details.