August 2006

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keyboards, keyboards, everywhere

August 30, 2006 in OLPC | 19 comments

NEED INPUT, STEPHANIE

One of the hardware components in the laptop is the keyboard. Because we’re looking to build a laptop that’s relatively well-sealed against the elements (that’s “water resistant” not “water proof”) we’ve been looking into using sealed keyboards.

The last set of keyboards that we got weren’t very good. When you used them it was too easy to hit the keys next to them, the keys were hard to press and the layout and feel wen’t very good.

We’ve just now gotten in a huge set of keyboards with a variety of weight and travel to test out what might be a good keyboard to use on the laptop. Even the keyboards that are at the edges of the weight and travel combinations feel so much better than the ones we originally had in the office. I’ve been able to plug them into my laptop and use them full time to get a feel for what people might experience with them. I must report that aside from the fact that it’s a bit smaller than what I’m used to, it’s not bad!

Were going to do a larger test with a bunch of kids (K-12) some time in the next few weeks and see what they think of them.

someone is copying someone, and it’s all pretty gross

August 23, 2006 in General | 12 comments

There’s an article over on abcnews that describes a man who had his twin brother growing in him for 36 years. (Uhh, eww?) But that’s not the interesting part. My buddy Zach points out the similarity of the text from the article and a related wikipedia article. First, the wikipedia article:

Fetus in fetu (or Foetus in foeto) describes an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. It continues to survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

And the abcnews article:

It is an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

I wonder who came first, or of they are both taking from somewhere else. The last edit on the wikipedia page is from July of 2006. I wonder if the abcnews article is recycled from something earlier as well.

wikipedia and the laptops

August 4, 2006 in OLPC | 6 comments

Andy Carvin is talking about the fact that we’re going to try to include some content from Wikipedia on the laptops when they ship. It’s pretty cool that this is public now.

The trick becomes – what content? What set of knowledge do we include? Some subset, different on each laptop? That’s hard from a manufacturing standpoint. But it would be great if we didn’t just have access to wikipedia in its current form, but could actually use the local laptops as independent storage for a subset of articles. Remember, a lot of the laptops are going to be put into the world in bandwith-limited places and they only have a few hundred meg for storage. So using a cooprerative caching mechanism might be interesting. Don’t have a page in your local cache? Ask a laptop around you. Then you go to the interweb to find more content.

no country orders for laptops

August 2, 2006 in OLPC | 5 comments

I keep seeing this meme reported over and over again: that One Laptop per Child has gotten commitments from countries that add up to 4 million laptops.

This is not true.

I want to make this very clear. I work in the One Laptop office every day and I’m generally aware of what’s going on with the various countries. I have talked with the stakeholders inside of the One Laptop organization and can confirm that nothing has been signed, and no country has yet been asked to sign.

This is not to say that we aren’t in discussions with countries – we clearly are. And there’s a huge amount of interest. But if you read Khaled’s words carefully you can see that he clearly says that nothing is signed:

“We have not finalized the deal with the Nigerian government yet, but we are in the process of doing so,” Hassounah told DesktopLinux.com. “The person who announced the Nigerian government’s commitment to buying the laptops (Professor Ernest Ndukwe) is a key member of the Nigerian Task Force working with OLPC on bringing laptops to Nigerian children.”

When we have something signed – and we will – I’m sure you’ll hear about it from us.