A Close(r) Look At OLPC Human Interface Guidelines 152
feranick writes "There have been a lot of articles on Slashdot about the OLPC project, most of
them regarding the hardware, the social impact or the cost of the
operation itself. However the software development,
specifically in the GUI didn't get so far much attention. This
blog summarizes some of the OLPC
global interface guidelines. You will see that what is really
new in the laptop is not the laptop itself, but the completely new idea
behind the design, where instead of applications you have activities,
documents are now journals,
'application bundles can be signed by
whoever works on them — because
there is a view source key on the keyboard,
anybody can modify an app
and distribute it'. It really looks like if this is successfully, we
could see a new breakthrough in GUI design also in mainstream PCs: "This
UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of
the desktop user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what
it is — boring and unoriginal.""
Endless Submenus (Score:4, Interesting)
there should be some way to work this out
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the other options are (in a convenient menu format, that is easy to read and available without extra training):
a) get rid of options
b) use a programmable input device, like a keyboard
c) use voice command
d) add other options here
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Note: This is what the Mac UI often does, so the submitter would have to stop whining about it.
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Now, personally, I see this as a minor evolutionary improvement on the 'tool palette' interface [adobe.com] made popular by Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Illustrator appliations, but that's just me.
Re:Endless Submenus (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Blender_node_s
LetterRip
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So why slag off MacOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
> user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."
Wrong answer.
If something is good, it *is*, of its own accord. There is no need to assert *something else is bad* - unless you're feeling insecure.
Re:So why slag off MacOS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are the latest changes coming out for OS X Leopard "boring and unoriginal"? Heck, we don't even know about half of them yet!
Nonetheless, many of these "unoriginal" ideas are actually "conventions" adopted by all major OS's because there was some agreement that they were "best of breed" ways to illustrate or accomplish something. That's not always a "bad" thing!
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This still works with most widget sets in Unix BTW.
Pie menus have mostly gone too although in a lot of cases they are great (you can memorize a movement once you are familiar with the menu layout).
And even with the X window managers that support mouse to focus, a lot of things regarding their depth management are poorly implemented. I still haven't figured out how to do in Metacity (the Gnome default) what I usually setup in KDE, that is bind mouse3 on the
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On the other hand, I don't think any major UI idea is ever lost, it just becomes another Free software project...
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Because Jobs fired the HCI team in 1997. (Score:2)
Initial Alpha builds of Rhapsody kept the Mac OS 9 user experience intact. Soon after the firing came the introduction of the Dock, the changes to erase stability of spatial reference, and the dumping of many of Mac OS 9's nicer UI features. It also allowed the company to release th
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Absolutely right! Apple used to have some great and serious people working on HCI, and made a lot of important advances (like HyperCard), which they have totally abandoned. Today, their user interfaces look and feel like they were designed by a bunch of cocaine-addled advertising executives.
Case in point: Why didn't the QuickTime team clean up their act after being inducted into the User Interface Hall of Shame [mac.com]? They have had 7 years to clean up that mess, but it's just gotten worse and worse!!!
It's
Re:So why slag off MacOS? Because it STILL sucks. (Score:2)
MacOS (and OS/X) most certainly IS boring and unoriginal. Mac OS/X is based on the ancient NeXT Step window system, which was design a long long time ago. Apple has totally stagnated, and has been resting on their laurels for many years now. All their focus is on meaningless fluff and window dressing, instead of usability and empowering users.
For example, take the QuickTime player, which has only gotten worse and more obnoxious in the service of marketing iTunes and upgrades and advertisements, since it
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So? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Anyway, seems a bit more than just renaming but certainly not new.
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I doubt this was intentional, but you should be more careful because you are begging the question with your loaded words. The critics of the OLPC gui design are claiming that it is not "more friendly". There is a constant confusion between a GUI that appears friendly and a GUI that is friendly. The difference is subtle, but important. (note: Gnome is my favourite desktop so I'm going to pick on them just to be fair)
It is easy to make a GUI appear friendly:
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As far as I'm concerned, they are called directories, and always will be.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Directories is a real-world text-based metaphor. Interestingly enough, the term is used primarily for text-based interfaces (such as CLI's). Call them what you want, but folder is the better metaphor for more people. Additionally, the fact that the icon is an image of a folder certainly helps the metaphor. What would a directory icon look like? A phone book? A mall directory?
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That fact that documents get saved, and can be access via the journal is almost secondary.
It's a shift in emphasis, and a restructuring of the storage metaphor in order to make the system more accessible to young minds.
Of course, it may turn out to be cosmetic - almost certainly will unless they're using something really exotic for the file system - but if the result is a better way to think about computer tasks it could
OpenDoc & Lifebooks (Score:3, Informative)
The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.
Pers
Flame bait... (Score:2)
We didn't really need this as part of the discussion.
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New (Score:4, Insightful)
This is new? The people from Xerox Parc are going to disagree.
Re:New (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only is the idea of "activities, not applications" old, it is not even a good idea. It puts a very important kind of choice in the hands of the person with the least information about what the user wants to do, which is extremely bad design.
People have heirarchies of goals. For example, I want to pass some course so I need to edit some document so I need to start
To take a hardware example, a nail gun is not a replacement for a hammer, as it is almost completely useless for many of the functions that hammers are routinely used for, like smashing things. Frequently, I want to use a hammer for something other than driving nails, and if some idiot developer handed me a nail gun because they presumed they knew what I was going to do with the hammer it would be annoying to say the least. Why should a developer be choosing what tool I use? And what business does a developer have in deciding what "activities" are legitimate? I want a toolbox that I can do with what I please, not a finite, static list of "activities" that are tied to a bunch of tools that are unrelated to those activities except in some developer's imagination.
There is a role for guidance in UI design--a system that suggests a tool for a given job--but to design the whole UI around the notion that the UI designer personally knows what activities a user will want to perform and that the UI designer personally knows how the user will want to perform them is simply a mistake. There are some tasks where the association is sort of clear, but the fact that "some A are B" does not imply that "all A are B", now does it? To defend this kind of design one needs to be able to prove that in the majority of cases the UI desiger, who has no clue about the user's actual goals, is more likely to make appropriate judgments about how to achieve them than the user ever will. This is a tall order.
The fact is that a lot of what users do is ill-defined and amorphous and not easily subject to classification. For example: what "activity" am I engaged in right now? Posting to
Re:New (Score:5, Interesting)
The metaphor isn't about using less tools it's about using them together. MacOS has an applications folder where everything goes. People might have 4 or 5 programs that can view/edit photos depending on their needs. Why not keep them separate (at a UI level) from your compilers.
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I don't think your example is great. You're suggesting that in your analogy you would say "I want a hammer" and the developer would give you a nail gun. Well you didn't ask for an activity, you asked for a tool. If you're asking to start an activity, you would say "I want to drive nails" and then you would get an appropriate tool. If you just want to smash something and not drive nails, then you should have said "I want to smash
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I believe you're overlooking the problem here: the maker of the tool (the hammer) has a particular set of uses in mind, and those uses do not necessarily correlate with the ways you want to use the tool. In other words, the UI "language" may not even include a way to specify
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First off, they're already planning to include one or more programming environments, so I don't think meeting this goal would add any additional development software dependencies. (I am assuming that t
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As far as I can tell, an "activity" is just a fusion of application+document. It means you don't have weird states like an application that's running but can't be used because it has no document loaded, or a document you can't open because you don't have the application.
What if I want to run an application that does not open documents? What if I want to view metadata about a document in a proprietary format that I can't decode? Maybe I'm just not understanding this revolutionary new concept, or maybe it
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By the way, to whoever is modding every post I make down, go get a life.
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"Document" in this case just means "application state".
I don't understand. The idea is that you always want your applications to be in some given state or the last state it was in? So if I have an image viewer I can't leave it open without any open images? If I quit it with open images it has those images open the next time I open it? Plenty of programs already do that. So what exactly is this concept? I searched Google but found nothing relevant.
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Yes, some apps preserve state but that's a per-app feature and not supported or tied into the operating system or UI. As far as Windows is concerned, there are applications and documents, and if an application happens to "remember" that it was last working on XYZ document that's nice but not anything it gets involved with. Tying them together is pretty central to the whole presence/collaboration work they have going on there - people share "activities" rather than apps or documents, and the details are sort
OLPC Hardware (Score:3, Informative)
However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
Re:OLPC Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
(sneaking off topic. mod me down!)
And because they violate everything a reasonable UI person holds dear. I'll grant that OS X didn't originally make great use of the corners. One is for the Apple menu, which is rarely needed, and the other is for the clock's menu, which is almost never needed. However, keeping those in the corners and then adding an option to have the corner respond to other actions is a bit annoying - now there's no easy way to know exactly what the corner will do until you try it. That, or discover it automagically because none of the Exposé actions require a click.
Which gets to the next problem. These corner actions are generally things that radically rearrange the screen, start a screen saver, etc. Without a click. This is extremely undesirable when you consider that Fitts Law cuts both ways - the corners are such easy targets that most users will frequently hit them even when they don't intend to. For example, it's common for me to fling the cursor off toward a corner when I want to get it out of my way so I can read a document more easily or whatever. With hot corners enabled, I'll often end up hitting one of those corners, which ironically massively re-arranges the screen, usually in a way that makes it completely impossible for me to continue my reading. Just about the exact opposite of what I was intending to do. Similar problems for when I'm trying to use a UI element that's close to a corner (window resizing controls, Apple menu, etc.)
The only hot corner I like and use is the one which keeps the screen saver from activating. It's also the only one that doesn't have a nasty habit of mucking with the screen when I don't want it to.
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You can't, but you can use splat-tab and all the Exposé hotkeys while dragging.
From a UI perspective, it'd be nice if Apple added Exposé silkstreens to the F9-F12 keys the way they have done for the volume and brightness controls. Though I suppose that wouldn't work so well if a user wants to reassign those keys. Of course, I'm not sure reassigning the Exposé hotkeys is any more useful than reassigni
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Actually, it depends on the touchpad's drivers and how they handle acceleration, etc. I've found that the some drivers work very well in this regard, in particular the Synaptics Windows drivers. The drivers that come with X.org (at least on Xubuntu) aren't bad, either, but they're not nearly as configurable.
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View Source Key (Score:5, Funny)
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If you tell them: "View Source" is the new "Reveal Codes" they will be all over it in a heartbeat.
-Graham
Reveal Codes in Word (Score:3, Informative)
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I appreciate and agree with your desire to add to the discussion, so I tried really hard to find something in your post that related to the OLPC "View Source" button. I read your post five or six times, but I didn't find anything. There must be
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I appreciate and agree with your desire to add to the discussion, so I tried really hard to find something in your post that related to the OLPC "View Source" button. I read your post five or six times, but I didn't find anything. There must be some subtle shade of meaning that somehow relates to the topic of discussion, but it is beyond my ability to discern. Since it is unimaginable that you would criticize my failure to contribute to the discussion in a post which itself also fails to contribute in prec
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From that point it was just self-perpetuating. Every one of your posts is self-referentially ironic, in that you enumerate my sins while simultaneously committing them yourself. You accuse me of straying from the topic in a post which strays from the topic.
OG: Original GUI (Score:4, Informative)
The new GUI might be revolutionary, and useful, and create the new paradigm. Just like MacOS did.
OLPC might make the now mature MacOS look boring. But if it makes MacOS look "unoriginal", just because so many have copied it, then the audience must be a world of children with the first laptop they've ever seen. Because MacOS originated the features that MacOS still keeps the cutting edge - until something like OLPC maybe replaces it. Even if so many others have copied it, MacOS is the original.
Unless you want to dig into MacOS's roots, like the Apple Lisa, or the Xerox Star. Which were prototypes, even the failed release Lisa. All PC design has been evolutionary, however big a leap one subsystem (like a GUI, or a LAN, or a laser printer on it, or an input peripheral like a mouse) makes. But those seminal roots just show how original was the MacOS, which made it work with its original improvements and integrations.
We should replace the ancient Mac GUI paradigm. It was revolutionary in the home and office, because it finally put the home and office on the screen, replacing the algebra classroom and typesetter formes. The original. Now it's over two decades old, and we're all more familiar with PCs than with file cabinets and document scrolls. So when we improve the paradigm, it's good to target the original. Pretending that MacOS isn't original makes it harder to beat it.
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You don't happen to be in management, do you? I believe you now hold the slashdot record for number of reoccurring uses of the word "paradigm" in a single non-Babylon-5 related post.
BBH
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Worse, I'm a tax collector. I charge "cliche" tax. Every time someone uses a globe in their corporate logo, I get a buck. A bridge is 50 cents. Two joining hands are 25 cents. Use a bridge embossed over a globe, it's $1.50. I trademarked all the popular logo cliches before the bubble and made a fortune.
BBH
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What words for "paradigm" are tax exempt, anyway?
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Wait, didn't that couple of cardiologists do something impossible?
I've played with it (Score:5, Informative)
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
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Globe = WWW? (Score:2)
The other issue... is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it.
I've always wondered about this. Why does a globe represent the WWW? This goes right back to the days of Mosaic, with the globe superimposed on the S (for Supercomputing?) Of course in 1992-1994 it was more commonly known as "the World Wide Web" or the "WWW" rather than just "the Web" or "the Internet", so a globe (world) was obvious. B
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Other than that, I got nothin'.
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Well, I've always thought of the Internet in terms of information flow, but a string of ones and zeros doesn't really do anything for people who don't know what binary is. The first thing I can come up with myself is a whole bunch of arrows pointing to a little stick-person, representing abstractly the idea that "things flow to you when you use this application", but you still have to represent "information" in some way or it just looks like you're being blown around by the wind.
About the best solution I
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OLPC image torrent (Score:2)
There's a torrent available, on torrentspy.com (search for OLPC). Alternatively, the magnet URI is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:U5CXHOLLT5ZGRGSVSGYRBCDJJRKN6X KD
Note that slashcode puts a space in that URI. Delete it.
Right now, I'm the only one seeding, and my connection isn't all that fast, but if a few others jump on board it should speed up in a hurry. It's not all that big (135MB).
The best UI in the world.... (Score:3, Insightful)
from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question [laptop.org]
"There is very little public information about requirements gathering, usability and user testing. In other words, how do you know whether the OLPC (i) will meet your users' needs and (ii) is easy enough for them to use? Have the target user groups been characterized? What ongoing plans do you have for this? I`d Like test the OLPC in Argentina, Please contct with me to know how. Thanks.
As far as I know, there are two local groups in Argentina with test boards (don't know if anybody has the 2B1/XO prototypes though). They are Ututo and Tuquito. I know Ututo had some explicit arrangements to let other people use/test the boards. If anybody knows about other groups (or about any local XOs) please let me know (or post in the OLPC Argentina pages. --Xavi 07:23, 6 December 2006 (EST)"
Before you go off spouting that you've designed a radical new UI that's better than anything else you might want to usability test it. Now I couldn't find anything on the link to Ututo and the link to Tuquito doesn't seem to have any English content but from the answer to the question it doesn't sound like there's a real plan for user testing a radical new UI that will be given to people who, according to the HIG are young and inexperienced.
To the designer's credit both of those criteria (young and inexperienced) give you the best possible scenario for introducing a new UI since children are more willing to play around and experiment and inexperienced computer users don't have the legacy of using an OS that worked any different from what you're giving them. Even with those advantages I'd hope that a project that is intended for a global audience would have more substantial usability testing plans than "lets give a couple to some people in Argentina and see what they think". I'm certainly not going to go all gaga over an untested UI that starts by throwing out decades of learning about how people interact with software.
Pie menus on OLPC (Score:2)
I think pie menus would work well in the OLCP user interface.
Pie menus [donhopkins.com] aren't radical or new, however they're a radial but non-standard menu UI that's been empirically tested [donhopkins.com] and shown to be faster and less error prone than linear menus.
Since the OLPC interface runs on a small screen, and uses the screen edges to frame and control the user interface, one issue that needs to be properly addressed is the screen edge problem:
You can pop up pie menus in the screen corners or along the screen edges, by
"A modest 128MB of memory" (Score:3, Informative)
Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"
Horizontal ToC mediawiki extension? (Score:2, Informative)
Let "them" test it...? (Score:2)
I agree that it is creative and ballsy and everything, but has it even been tested? Wouldn't it be even more ballsy to test it on ourseves before peddling it as an educational tool to the poorer part of the world? I know I'm being rather critical here, and
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Good idea. Why don't you go to laptop.org and download your own copy of the software and, well, test it, then? I did, and I found it has far more strengths than weaknesses. I really feel that they got inside the head of a first-time computer user; not confusing them with details, and creating sim
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Thank you for being so reasonable.
> I really feel that they got inside the head...
Wow, great to hear.
Just last night I discussed with my dad (old time IT dude) how the MSO specs was 6000 pages, the OOo 700, and the Mac GUI specs a mere 60
Designed by Committee (Score:2)
Bob? (Score:2)
I want one (Score:2)
Fitts' Law? (Score:2)
The locations easiest to reach on the screen are not the edges or the corners, they're the location of the mouse itself. As screens get larger, this becomes more and more true.
The most comment operations need to be right where the mouse is in a contextual menu, selected from a specific and con
Lots of nonsense... (Score:2)
If you want a better way to tell this guy is a know-nothing crackpot, notice that he includes the lack of a URL bar as a great interface feature, along with the rest of his overhyped claims of interface design magic...
That's not an interface improvemen
A picture of food isn't nourishing (Score:2)
So is giving children tools to teach them, and bring them up from poverty. Both efforts are important.
Re:Mod me whatever....but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world. The world needs to learn how to do it themselves. Therefore if we spent all our time and effort giving people food the world would actually be a worse place. Giving people the ability to learn how to do things for themselves, as opposed to only teaching them how to put out their hand and beg for food is surely a much better approach to the problem.
There was another obvious point: You can still give them food at the same time. The OLPC project does not prevent aid! Also, I love how everyone is so specific to "omg teh children". Because as soon as people become adults we really just couldn't care less, huh? Perhaps if they had some/any education before they became adults they'd be able to take care of the children themselves. Also, let's just skip the arms trade arguments altogether and blame the OLPC project for the proliferation of the problem.
World food shortage? Really? (Score:2)
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world.
A world food shortage? Really? To date everything I've heard suggests that the issue is unequal distribution -- that there is more than enough arable land to provide a balanced diet of some variety to everyone in the world. Some countries have an abundance of natively fertile soil, such as the US and Canada; some have used clever hack
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In other words, you think the best way to address a famine is to let people die?
No, there is a surplus of food in the world, not a shortage.
Or we could, you know, help them with this. Give them food (so they don't all die), and help them set up the required infrastructure within which they can feed themselves. Sometimes f
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The Food "Surplus" [dieoff.org]
Also, note, the surplus is going down. Ignore the surplus number and saying "hey we're in a surplus". Look at the net production compared to the net consumption of food on the planet, then you have to factor import/export etc, also note that poor countries don't earn enough to import food (hey, perhaps we should get some education and the internet...but how?). Anyway, I can't quite find the quote source but it's here [plantsforhunger.org]:
"For ye
Re:Mod me whatever....but... (Score:4, Interesting)
What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.
Something to think about.
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THIS IS MORE URGENT THAN I THOUGHT!!! WE MUST SEND THEM LAPTOPS SO THEY STOP SITTI
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oh... there we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm stunned to learn that
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If we were to spend the same amount of resources feeding people as we did on this (and similar) projects things would be far worse.
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If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.
A smart businessman looks for return on investment. Right now many countries spend huge amounts providing food to other countries. This investment is much larger than the OLPC project. The food donated in this way destroys the local market for food, decimating the remains of the agricultural secto
Re:Letting 4 year olds mess with the code? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Vaporware (Score:4, Insightful)
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Without an actual figure attached to the display ("activity A is using 60% of your total memory... You may launch any new activity that uses 28Mb or less"), the memory indicator is somewhat useless. I'm not saying it's not important to display this information, just wondering at the logic of displaying it in a