Fortnightly Mailing

XP on the OLPC. Proprietary software meets open source hardware.

Normally it is the other way round.

In the continuation post below is a 5 minute video of Microsoft's Bohdan Rakiborski explaining somewhat thinly how Microsoft made Windows XP and Office run on the OLPC. The video serves also as an impressive demonstration of the OLPC laptop itself. There is no mention of OLPC's mesh networking capability - key to its exploitation as an educational device - and which is presumably inoperative when the OLPC runs Windows XP; and of the suite of educational software that ships with OLPC there is no sign. Because it is gone.....

There is a telling look on Rakiborski's face when he says "It starts up about four times faster than the original operating system that ships on the XO laptop" (is this mainly a result of the addition of a 2 GB SD memory card?), but Rakiborski is pretty obviously taken with the underlying design of the laptop - low power consumption, sunlight readable screen, e-book mode etc*.

* At the 2006 World Economic Forum Bill Gates reportedly said, "If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user. Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type."

Debategraph: the debate processor. Guest Contribution by David Price.

Question: What do you get if you cross a wiki, a forum, a blog, instant messaging, and social bookmarking with an argument map?

Answer: Debategraph.org

I started to collaborate on Debategraph with, my co-founder, Peter Baldwin in 2005. It’s one of those delightfully unlikely collaborations that the Internet makes possible: I’m based in Somerset in the UK and Peter is based in the Blue Mountains in Australia. We discovered each other, across the net, because we had two things in common: a shared perception of a problem and a shared idea for a solution.

When the cloud bursts - following an electrical fire in a data centre in Texas

Over the weekend a large data-centre in Texas suffered an electrical fault, resulting in a fire and in several thousand servers providing services to several thousand customers (including me, indirectly, as my Statcounter site statistics service is hosted there), being taken off line - with some data-loss. A fascinating chronology of how Planet, the company running the data-centre, handled the emergency, is (currently) visible on the company's bulletin board.

Ultra-mobile PCs in abundance - all are potential platforms for Sugar

Walter Bender writes in the 2/6/2008 Sugar Digest (see this earlier post for more on Sugar):

"The success of the OLPC XO and the ASUS Eee PC seems to have attracted the attention of the industry: it has been a busy week in the world of ultra-mobile PCs. Dell (see http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/dells-mini-inspiron-eee-pc-killer-revealed/), Acer (see
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/29/first-pics-of-acers-aspire-one-eee-pc-twin/),  Wizbook (see http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/28/noon-eee-pc-wizbook-hits), Elonex (see http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8294433279.html), and Kanguru (see http://pc.kanguru.pt/Home/) were all making headlines. Each of these machines represents yet another potential platform for running Sugar."

Machines with consciousness? A spectrum from Kurzweil (yes) to Penrose (no).

Will machines develop consciousness? Published by the IEEE in a special report on the "singularity" (a.k.a. the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence), this  handy and quite entertaining chart by Paul Wallich colour codes 15 thinkers on the subject (all men) according to whether they are true believers, deniers, or somewhere in between.