There has been a ton of noise and some signal about the recent disagreements about OLPC management, direction, policy, strategy, etc. and while I usually try not to contribute to the noise, here's a post that was in response to a blog entry by Ivan Krstić on his notebook (Its a long post. Read it in full. Some language NSFW)...but, I found the response by Pamela Jones (of Groklaw fame) more interesting. So, here's a part of that response. You can read the full post here:

Its one thing to explore the limits of what technology can do for you, but it takes an entirely different mindset to figure out and limit what technology may do for you. How cheap can laptops get and still be useful? We are seeing this with many new products such as the XO-1 laptop from OLPC, The Eee PC from Asus, and many other ultra low-cost PCs as they are being called. One common theme across these cheap laptops has been the use of Linux. This article from PC World point out to an interesting effort from those people in Redmond. From PC World:

Calling the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community!

If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to SF State campus for a get together on May 11, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! Don't have an XO? Download a LiveCD from  http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd/ or simply bring your enthusiasm.

It was a great day to be at the beach in San Francisco (Apr 27, 2008). Thanks to Jason Stone and Jim Stockford for sparing their Sunday afternoon, we met up at Ocean Beach with three XO laptops. The little green machines attract a good bit of attention. Even before we got started with out little experiment, we had people stopping by to ask questions or just check out the green machine.

 

 

So, the experiment was: How far will the point-to-point mesh network on the XOs go in relatively clear RF (radio frequency) environment? At least cleaner as far as 2.4 GHz spectrum goes. We did such a run on campus and got about 600 feet max. or so across two XO units. I suspected that this was because our campus has a lot of Wi-Fi traffic, so the interference alone would decrease the hop length. We also have a lot of foliage, so that would add to the interference.

Ocean beach is right along the Pacific at the edge of San Francisco. I hoped that RF would be cleaner there. So, we got started by setting up the mesh of three laptops (me, Jim and Jason) and then got Jim firmly planted (say, position A) in the thick of beach population to answer questions. Jason and I walked south while pinging Jim's laptop all along. Well, we kept on walking...and walking...and walking. This was definitely way beyond 600 feet. Eventually, we started seeing "host unreachable" a few times, so we stopped. We saw ping times of about 25 to 30 ms. Jason became point B there. I kept walking further south and after a few steps, the pinging resumed with low latencies (3 to 5 ms). I kept walking...and walking...and walking. A quick note about walking on the beach. Walk closer to the water. Its a lot firmer and works well when measuring paces (1 pace approximately equals three feet). Eventually, I started seeing "host unreachable". I called Jim to verify. He was seeing the same. I tried holding the laptop higher up and the pings would resume. Eventually, I stopped at what I thought was the outer limit of pings, marked the spot and took the following picture.

I just finished installing 8.04 LTS on my old(er) Fujitsu Lifebook P2120. Yeah, I'm slow at adoption...by a few days. So, forgive me! Anyway, I had tested the Beta under VMWare so no real surprises there, except the big surprise was with suspend and hibernate. After installing and without further updating, I decided to try out suspend and hibernate features. Well, guess what? They work like a charm. A bit slow compared to Windows XP or MacOSX, but it actually works!!! Way to go Ubuntu!!!

It seems that Adobe is working towards removing some barriers to the adoption of its Flash technology. This may very well be due to pressure from potential competition such as Silverlight. From Adobe's site:

"...as part of Adobe’s ongoing commitment to enable Web innovation, Adobe will continue to open access to Adobe Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). This work will include:

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Here's a quick set of links to update you all on different pilots that are either ongoing or are completed around the world. Then there is the "Our Stories" project that's very interesting.

Our Stories (http://www.ourstories.org) is a joint project involving OLPC, UNICEF, Google, and others to facilitate children telling their own stories and those of their communities around the world. The basic format will be 3-5 minute audio recordings with geodata, and optional text and images; these will be visualized on maps of the world, and shared publicly over local and global networks.

The Story Corps team helped with advice about their own process for interviewing a friend or loved one that will work for a young audience of interviewers; the idea is to localize the process and surrounding projects, and to carry out class activities around such interviews in OLPC partner countries. The project hopes to have a third of all XO owners record a story by the end of next year.

Updated slides for "Translating for the XO using Pootle" are now available at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf Original Open Document Format file is at http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp. Thanks to Sayamindu Dasgupta for updating the slides and content.

 

This is an inspirational video. Sure, the XO laptop is an incredible piece of technology, but that's not as inspiring. Its the faces of children and the hope that somehow this project will improve their lives all over the world.

I came across this neat project called InetBoot. This is a web-enabled boot loader for booting into ISO files. The bootloader is a small ISO (5.3 mb) itself that does some initial booting, networking, and then a request for the ISO over httpfs. The incoming ISO is then mounted and the process goes on from there. Its neat in that with a small local bootable image, you can send in ISOs over HTTP instead of NFS. I am planning on trying ti out for the Live CDs for OLPC.