A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
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I didn’t know that this was a real site. But blogs.com is real (they do exist!), and they just made an amazing post/update about OLPC. They covered just about everything that’s been happening lately.
They mentioned the OLPC Blog, G1G1, the new G1G1 FAQ, Amazon, SWIFT and Google, the manual and (the amazing) Anne Gentle‘s work on the manual.
Crazy stuff. It’s pretty rare to see something so well researched on the web.
+1 Blogs.com
Nice, we’re finally setting up a blog for OLPC:
We need guest posts! Please help! (email sj at laptop dot org with posts)
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“It’s an education project, not a genetic engineering project.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm.
Mission Statement: To increase the Darwinian fitness of the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-energy, internet-enabled velociraptor with content designed for collaborative, practical, self-empowered survival
Those crazy Olin kids… Go check out www.velociraptorz.org/ and buy a t-shirt.
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Now, I haven’t actually used Windows on XO for more than a few seconds. There are something like three at the OLPC offices AFAIK. But with the announcement of a viable form of XP on the XO the blogosphere has had a field day. CNET has finally posted a reasonable, if non-technical, side by side comparison of the two versions of the machine. The results in the actual article are fairly ambiguous, but blogs, both secular and FOSS have decried that kids prefer Sugar over XP.
But more surprisingly, the great majority of blogs about the subject have been in Espanol.
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The popular turn-based strategy game, Battle for Wesnoth, has been bundled and customized for the XO. It’s pretty big at 77mb, but it’s a great game and I’m very happy to see it as an activity on the XO. Thank you Jeremy Visser!
http://jeremy.visser.name/2008/10/25/battle-for-wesnoth-for-olpc-released/trackback/
via Appropedia (Sustainable technology wiki):
Toilet. Internet. OLPC. Bollywood. SRLY?
The world becomes a weirder place day by day.
But akvo.org looks like a really interesting group interested in Open Source sanitation information available over the internet. The posters are designed with a Bollywood-esk look to garner enough interest to go to the website.
As silly as this idea is, I love it.
(note: they’re using a beta revision of the XO hardware (B2). You can tell by the green hinge case.)
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Rock!
I am now an Admin on the OLPC wiki!
Now I can move pages and block people and stuff!
Mohahaha! And now the world!
One Laptop per Child + Creative Commons are gathering free books, music and media for the LiveContent DVD CC is mastering this month. Join us in Cambridge and San Fran this Saturday, or choose materials on your own ( see http://olinolpc.org and http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators ).
It’s Mel and Nicole’s OLPC group at OLIN throwing a HackingJam. It’s going to be a pretty cool event IMO. I would of course, love to go. But that’s not going to happen since it’s across the country. Maybe this summer?
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The first issue of the Weekly Zine has been posted to the wiki. Expect more from this project. It’s awesome licious!
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The OLPC Support Gang gets tons of abuse. We’re the people who answer all of the emails that come into help@laptop. We’re all unpaid, and just want to help people. When we can’t solve a person’s problem, or if the XO doesn’t go to all of their Flash websites, or isn’t able to do everything that a $2000 Dell can, we get flak for it.
There are tons of examples of angry customers (which I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t can’t post). But I think that this message to a customer from one of the Support Gang is exactly what G1G1 recipients should understand, something they never understood, or decided to ignore:
Always remember rule number one of the XO. You are not the customer. The
XO is great fun, and stretching it’s capabilities towards our first
world tasks can be entertaining (believe me, I’ve gone further than
most), but when it comes down to it, it just won’t be happy trying to do
a lot of things that you’d think that it should be able to do with no
problems. If in the end, you are disappointed that it can’t do this,
that, or the other thing that a more ‘normal’ box can, remember, it does
a lot of things for its real audience that nothing else can. And that’s
what it’s about.
Disclosure: I don’t answer tickets nearly as much as 95% of the group. When I say We, I’m not nearly as cool as some.
