Archive for January 2008
links for 2008-01-31
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The OLPC project brought several dozen machines to the conference to be handed out, at random, to attendees who would promise to either do something amazing with them or give them to somebody else who would.
OLPC Donations at Linux.conf.au 2008
Lwn.net recently had a short story, A moment from LCA2008, about the donation by the OLPC of several dozen XO-laptops to participants in Linux.conf.au, an annual Linux conference in Australia. The story is quite short. The nicest part is a wonderful picture of a stakk of XO’s about to be distributed to very experienced Linux programmers. As the story says:
The OLPC project brought several dozen machines to the conference to be handed out, at random, to attendees who would promise to either do something amazing with them or give them to somebody else who would. It was, as Rusty Russell put it, rather like being given a puppy. There are, however, fewer cleanup problems to deal with.
Congratulations to the OLPC on such a thoughtful and intelligent move. I agree getting XO’s into the hands of experienced programmers is very important; see rsyncing the planet.
By the way, before I sent my XO off to Tridge he said he already had access to one, but that he knew a good home for another one, so I sent the one I bought for him on its way to Australia.
links for 2008-01-30
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A new thin-client that requires more than a thin amount of cash, $450.
links for 2008-01-24
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OLPC XO laptop update from COO Walter Bender.
links for 2008-01-23
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“The thin client technology allows users to run most of these applications from their laptop environment of choice and that was a huge turning point at the school, Simon said.”
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“With BigBoard software running on an Ubuntu server, support requests no longer fall through the cracks, and the Desktop Computer Services group consistently ranks among the highest faculty-rated IT support departments on campus.”
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“Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth. We’re
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We’ll be seeing more and more boards like this, and they get cheaper and cheaper. Some will hopefully power thin-clients in the classroom
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“So the ideal solution was a desktop environment that was able to run their enterprise system, had outstanding stability and reduced maintenance requirements. That’s where Ubuntu came in.”
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Ongoing page of Ubuntu case studies. Many recent entries are about education.
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Says Chief Executive Samuel J. Palmisano: “The big issues for us are: Where do you put them? How do you retain them? How do you develop them? How do you move work to them or them to work?” Says Dave, big challenge for U.S. is how to educate our own stude
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This plan, based on low-cost XP, assumes developing countries can afford the hardware needed to run XP. Even that can be a problem. Ii the hardware has a significant street value then how do you keep it safely inside the school?
links for 2008-01-20
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This could also be done using the XO laptop to monitor the stethoscope, making this one of the many ways in which the XO could be used to provide new ways to collect and assess data in the developing world.
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Insightful post on the distinction between submitting code under an open-source license and copyright assignment. For example, the Free Software Foundation requires a copyright assignment for contributions to their code base
links for 2008-01-18
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This is a *very* insightful post on the problems of building and maintaining an open-source community, in this case that of the Gentoo Linux distribution. One hopes that those in a position to bring Gentoo back on track , the Genoo developers, read this p
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Glynn Moody on Sun’s acquisition of MySQL. I share his doubts that executing s/LAMP/SAMP/ is possible..
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A remarkable in-depth analysis by Redmonk’s Steve O’Grady of Sun’s acquisition of MySQL produced in a remarkably short time, within a day of the announce. Especially notable are its open publication and the large number of cited links. Keep up the good w
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Good short history of Red Hat, supplier of the Linux distribution used by the OLPC XO Laptop. Michael Tiemann, mentioned in the article, is a fellow owner of an XO laptop.
On the death of the client/server computer model
I’m on the road this week. As part of my trip I attended a conference in Dayton, and as part of that conference I observed a group of about thirty teachers and future teachers who are currently students at Wright State University use a computer.
The presentation began with all present opening up a browser and going to Google, and then doing a search on a topic of interest to them. I was sitting in the back of the room, and so could see what many of them were doing. The Wright student sitting next to me was viewing videos about Cuttlefish in the sea near Australia, and I learned he was doing a project with a group of fourth-grade students on this strange beast.
As it happens, this presentation was delivering the internet via a Linux-based solution. It took me a few hours to fully comprehend what I had witnessed, that it didn’t matter to them how the internet was delivered.
They were accessing the internet through a diskless box with 128M memory, using a stripped-down Linux kernel with X11. But a key point is that to view the internet they just needed to have the HTML text sent over the wire from the server to their barebones box so the browser could do the rendering. The “box” was an old computer, one that could in no way run Vista, yet it met all their needs.
They didn’t even know the internet was being brought to them via Linux. All that mattered was that is was on their screen.
So much for the client-server model that has been the basis of the Microsoft franchise. It is now toast, a relic of days gone by. These current users could care less. All that matters is that the browser delivers the content they wish on demand. To them, a computer is just a device for delivering the internet.
XO Weekend
I just got the following email from Robert Bolgar, father of the Brothers Bolgar, Josh and Zander:
Subject: XO Weekend
Hi David,
How is your schedule this Sunday for continued XO teaching? If you are busy, no prob. Josh will study more for midterms.
Thanks,
Robert
Here is my reply:
I’m on road now, in Detroit as I write this. I get back late Saturday, and will be free to visit the boys on Sunday afternoon. Let me know what time after noon is convenient.
I post this because I was quite taken by the title of Robert’s post: “XO weekend.” Isn’t that a nice thought? If you have an XO, how do you plan to spend this weekend with your XO? With whom?
As noted I’m on the road. this week. I spent a fun couple of hours two nights ago writing some Python code based on an idea that came to me while I was in Schipol Airport in Amsterdam a few weeks ago. It is a variation of one of the basic XO Snippy programs, one I find quite exciting.
Say what you will, the XO is just a barrel of fun. You just need to dive in and find how it best works for you, and what you hope to accomplish.
links for 2008-01-17
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Interesting. One commercial software firm, Sun, is buying another, MySQL AB. Let’s hope Sun learns more about open-source governance from MySQL than MySQL does from Sun.
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My guess is that this is first e-learning solution project to be accepted by Apache Software Foundation. A very interesting development, and one hopes this is just the first of a series of projects with a focus on education.
