I promise a New Years post in the near future - but that takes a good deal of effort and this is just fun.
I've written about the $100 laptop - which has since become the $150 laptop before, but the breakdown is that a man named Nicholas Negroponte out of MIT has designed a aptop or distribution to developing countries so that every child ca afford to be computer competent and competitive in the 21st century. Pretty neat, eh?
One of the major ideas is that third world countries will then be able to 'Leap-frog' skipping the ugly industrial revolution, and all the associated goods and evils that go along with it. Its debatable whether that is a good thing or not, and also not the point of this post. (i.e. we can pretty easily see now that instantly democratizing countries pretty invariably causes severe sectarian violence and possibly more trouble than i we'd just eft them alone, what will instantly technologizing countries do...?)
Anyway, what I'm actually writing about is the use interface of these new computers, as it is unlike anything we've seen. It re-designs how we think of computers and their uses. Here's the video:
Now, a few things of note here that I think can/might revolutionize the generation of kids who get these things. You stop thinking of the computer as a tool for producing files and documents and start thinking of it as your work environment. If you watch the video you see how your desktop can be zoomed out to see everyone's desktop in a kind o uber-project management view. So, if you are doing your own research and work other people can peek over your shoulder without bothering you, or spin your work off into something of their own.
Stop right there. What's that say for copyright? Personal prestige? Is this omputer good for private work? Is this communism in a bottle?
I don't think so. This is nothing more than what us gearheads try to set up already on our own machines with a better UI. For good project management we have a bunh of tools for telecommuting already. IRC chats, Instant Messaging, Writeboards, Wikis, Social Networking groups, etc, etc.
Thing is, right now, us gearheads need to patch all these tools together and make them work on our machines. These machines come with it pre-setup - in fact it is the way you use these machines. That is the key - These kids aren't being taught to use a computer at work, they are being taught to work in the computer. If you need a new piece of software - there is a drag and drop section to build it. *nix (Unix and LInux) gurus know this as piping, derived from this character '|' whenever you need to stitch several programs together you can 'pipe' output from one into another. So, say I want to do my taxes. I have my receipts in a spreadsheet that totals them, and a tax program that takes my personal info, and another one that handles the e-file functionality. (and this is a little oversimplified for clarity's sake). I can write something like this:
receipts && personal info.txt | taxes | efile
I now have a 'program' that doesn my taxes for me. Well it looks like the $150 laptop has a graphical version of that. Remember that old game 'The Incredible Machine' where you graphically built machines to get from A to B. Or the board game 'Mousetrap'. Same thing, kinda.
Anyway, if you follow all that - watch out. This new machine with its bitty 386Mhz processor will be able to take out your 3gHz desktop without breaking a sweat because of how its used. Real David and Goliath stuff going on here.
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