February 21st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Network World reports that Quanta has received orders to produce the first million OLPC XO laptops for the One Laptop per Child project.
One million computers is just the beginning:
“Quanta said it could ship between 5 million to 10 million units this year because seven nations have already signed up for the project. That may be enough to reduce the costs and meet the $100 goal sooner than expected.
The governments that have committed to buy laptops for their schoolchildren include Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on Production of One Million OLPC XOs to Begin
February 15th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
DesktopLinux.com reports that eight countries will receive a share of the initial 2,500 OLPC machines in February.
“The experiment is a prelude to mass production of the kid-friendly, lime-green-and-white laptops scheduled to begin in July, when 5 million will be built.
State educators in Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand and possibly Ethiopia and the West Bank will receive the first of the machines in February’s pilot before a wider rollout to Indonesia and a handful of other countries.”
With a goal of 150 million delivered by 2010, OLPC will alter the landscape of computing around the world. Further, it could help Linux marketshare reach 20% or more globally, entirely as a side effect of the project’s primary purpose. No wonder Bill Gates can’t stop trying to critique it!
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | 1 Comment »
February 14th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Yahoo News reports that 175,000 USB Flash Drives loaded with open source programs will be distributed to Parisian high school students next school year (fall 2007).
The drives will contain Firefox 2, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, an IM client and audio and video players. (Based on the explanation, it sounds like they will be the portable versions of these applications.)
“The sticks will give the students, aged 15 and 16, the freedom to access their e-mail, browser bookmarks and other documents on computers at school, home, a friend’s house or in an Internet café — but at a much lower cost than providing notebook computers for all, a spokesman for the Greater Paris Regional Council said Friday.”
Slashdot also discussed the story in its usual energetic way.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 175,000 FOSS USB Flash Drives in Paris
February 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
ConsortiumInfo.org’s Standards Blog reports that an open format bill has been filed in Texas. Following Massachusetts and Minnesota, the Texas government seems headed for ODF.
The bill would require state government agencies to store their data in open document formats, and defines what it means by “open document formats.” Its definition matches Minnesota’s, and it seems clear that OpenDocument meets the criteria while MSOOXML does not.
Updegrove discusses how Massachusetts’ pioneering work has helped open the trail for other states to follow: “It will be very interesting indeed to see how this bill fares. On the plus side, the IT department of Texas will be spared the wrenching experience that the IT managers of Massachusetts suffered when they sought to put such a policy in place. Too, debate over the bill will occur in public. But on the negative, the legislators of Texas may be surprised at the magnitude of effort that lobbyists may expend on “educating” them on the issues at hand.”
Texas is the second most-populous state, and an important technology center, so the scale of this development is very significant.
LinuxWorld Australia also covers the story, and Sam Hiser analyzes it in detail.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on Open Format Bill Filed in Texas
February 7th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Our friends at In Pictures have helped a school in Durban, South Africa, set up a computer lab running Linux Terminal Server with Ubuntu and OpenOffice.
Inpics’ role was to provide a local installation of its online tutorial for student use, while a local group, eTux, found the recycled hardware, set up the machines as thin clients, networked the systems and installed the OS and applications.
“Craig Adams, the leader of eTux, wanted to use the free online OpenOffice tutorials at inpics.net, but the lab had no Internet access. He contacted In Pictures, who provided the tutorials to him as a download. He then installed them on the lab’s server.”
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Inpics Helps South African School Adopt Linux
February 6th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Gregory M. Lamb of the Christian Science Monitor has reviewed the concept and prototype of OLPC’s XO, the “$100 Laptop”.
“It’s an astonishing experiment: Design a cool computer, unlike anything on the market, loaded with innovative features. Manufacture it for not much more than $100 apiece, a fraction of what other computers cost. Persuade government officials in developing countries to buy millions of them, and hand them to schoolchildren. Then stand back and see if you’ve done what you hoped – created a revolution in the way kids learn.
The next step in turning this techno-dream into a reality begins in February when prototypes of the XO laptop go out to be kid tested in a dozen or so countries from Brazil to Rwanda, Libya to Pakistan.”
Mesh networking, extremely low power consumption, and water- and dirt-resistant construction are some of the interesting and important hardware features being pioneered by the XO machine. However, the distribution and usage models are where the most unique innovations will occur.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on CS Monitor on the OLPC XO, the “$100 Laptop”
January 23rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Wikis have been one of my key interests for more than four years now, because they bring a new level of interactivity to websites and web-based communities.
My own hands-on project in the world of wikis is Wikipages, a wiki-based local business directory that currently focuses on New York City.
Over the past year, Wikipages traffic has grown steadily as it has been linked to by bloggers and bookmarking sites. Its listings have grown to include hundreds of businesses in the city, with a preponderance of restaurants and bars, but also realtors, chiropractors, photo labs, and even the occasional copy shop. But we’re also happy to list parks and museums and to include neighborhoods and special districts like Stone Street, at the heart of downtown Manhattan.
Wikipages should grow very quickly in 2007, and more contributors are always welcome!
Posted in Announcements, Free Culture, Uncategorized, Wiki | Comments Off on Introducing Wikipages.com
January 9th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
I just discovered Opportunity Knocks, a blog covering ODF, free and open source software, and government interest in open standards and open source.
I plan to link to several of Walt’s recent posts individually, since I’ve found many of them to be very interesting.
Yesterday, Walt posted a list of desktop and online applications that can read and write ODF files, for people who may not yet know what ODF is or how to create and use ODFs.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on “Opportunity Knocks,” an ODF and FOSS Blog
January 3rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Students at the University of Illinois are developing an ODF Accessibility Evaluator:
“The ODF Accessibility Analyzer is a tool to be employed by users of OpenDocument Format-compatible authoring tools to ensure that a document in this format, be it text, spreadsheet, presentation, etc., is accessible to people with disabilities. The Analyzer will adhere to the ODF specification, as put forth by the OASIS organization.”
Files can be uploaded to the page linked above for analysis.
Peter Korn of Sun analyzes the project and its potential impact:
“To the best of my knowledge, tools like this only exist for three types of files: HTML files, PDF files, and now ODF files. Perhaps that is because HTML, PDF/A, and ODF are open standards which contain a lot of accessibility features put there through the thoughtful evaluation of and feedback from a community of accessibility experts.”
Last year’s attacks on ODF for not being accessible enough (though it’s still debatable whether they were valid at all), have been turned from showcasing a weakness, to a strength for ODF.
An open standard can be quickly improved or supported by stakeholders or interested parties that might come from anywhere–if it had been Microsoft’s format being criticized in this way, there is no way that a third-party group of students could have helped solve the problem, because Microsoft’s own licensing would bar them from getting involved.
ODF’s accessibility features are improving so quickly due to community support, that they are going to blow away the options Microsoft offers. Soon the disabled community will be much better served by open source than their current tools, and I look forward to welcoming yet another group of allies to the open source and open standards camp!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on ODF Accessibility Test Tool
January 2nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The One Laptop per Child project received positive coverage in the BBC news today.
More countries than I realized have joined the project, and they represent a wide geographic distribution: “The first countries to sign up to buying the machine include Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand.”
Project founder Nicholas Negroponte was quoted, saying “I have to laugh when people refer to XO as a weak or crippled machine and how kids should get a ‘real’ one,” Mr Negroponte told AP.
“Trust me, I will give up my real one very soon and use only XO. It will be far better, in many new and important ways.”
And, further:
“One of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint,” Mr Negroponte said.
“I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.”
The XO’s operating system has abandoned the old UI paradigm of files and folders, instead moving to a wiki-like organizational structure based around the user’s “journal” in which all his or her data is stored. Having seen the trouble many users have with the computer folder metaphor, I am very interested in how the journal concept will fare, and I expect it to do well.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Wiki | Comments Off on BBC on OLPC ($100 Laptop Project)