olpc

For many years, there has been a growing concern about the emergence of a “digital divide” between rich and poor. The idea is that people who don’t meet a certain threshold income won’t be able to afford the investment in computers and internet connectivity that makes further learning and development possible. They’ll become trapped by their circumstances. Under proprietary commercial operating systems, which impose a kind of plateau on the cost of computer systems, this may well be true. But GNU/Linux, continuously improving hardware, and a community commitment to bringing technology down to cost instead of just up to spec, has led to a new wave of ultra-low-cost computers, starting with the One Laptop Per Child’s XO. These free-software-based computers will be the first introduction to computing for millions of new users, and that foretells a much freer future.

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Is the desktop dead?

Laurie Langham
2007-05-14
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Red Hat’s, Brian Stevens, claims that the desktop is dead. This may seem a trifle premature, but from my own perspective, that has already been the case for several years.

Across the room, from where I’m typing this, I have a formal computer desk, complete with comfortable “executive” chair, adjustable foot-rest (your feet will love you till the day they drop off if you buy them one of these), nice, fast AMD64 tower case, and a 19 inch IBM-Lenovo LCD screen, to look at everything.

Education, education, education

Jonathan Roberts
2007-05-13
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I heard a phrase today that reminded me of my childhood: “…learning and sharing together”. I’m not sure if I ever heard this exact phrase, but it was definitely a theme that was central to my early education; it’s now a central theme of my life again, this time through free software. This link between free software and education was first made by Richard Stallman in his essay Why Schools Should Use Exclusively Free Software, and this link is now being reinforced by the work that’s going on with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

One Laptop Per Child kicks off PyCON 2007

Terry Hancock
2007-02-24
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This year’s Python Convention [1], being held this weekend in Dallas Texas, started off with an inspiring presentation by an engineer from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project [2] (Ivan Krstić) , showing off the hardware features of the new “OLPC XO 1” prototype, as well as some “dangerous ideas” about its software design: a large part of the user space code for the laptops will be implemented in Python, mainly because of the ease of manipulating the source code. The OLPC laptop software will be 100% free software, not just in principle, but in spirit as well—the assumption of open source design is literally built into the hardware.

Computational ubiquity

Anthony Taylor
2006-12-11
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I’ve been re-reading The Third Wave, by Alvin Toffler. Though first published over twenty years ago, there’s still some serious predictive mojo left in that book. The basic concept is this: there have been two previous “waves” of civilization. The first was the agricultural wave, which spread across the world over the course of several thousand years. About three hundred years ago, the second wave of civilization began—the industrial revolution. Now we are in the middle of the next wave, the information revolution.