On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> John Watlington wrote: > | On May 22, 2008, at 11:01 AM, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > |> GPS enables a lot of mapping and geography-related educational > |> activities, which is why it was originally considered for the XO-1. > |> It would probably (like the camera) only be powered on when being used > |> (although the long lock-on time might make this user-unfriendly). > > Long lock-on times have been reduced considerably in the latest generation > of cheap GPS hardware. Initializing with a good guess makes it even > faster, just a few seconds. > Yes. > > |> Google Earth-like applications are fantastic for giving students a > |> sense of their place on the earth, and there's a lot of economic > |> possibility inherent in allowing kids to create better maps for their > |> local neighborhoods. But, the time/cost was not ripe for Gen 1, and > |> it may not be for Gen 2 either. > | > | Probably not. Remember the accusations that we already > | HAVE a GPS unit in the XO, and are using it to track everybody... > | Would we have to have a hardware-only light that indicates that > | the GPS unit has been used to locate the laptop ? > > A hardware light sounds like a good idea to me. Nonetheless, we should > not allow the conspiracy theorists to design our hardware. We are of > course speaking about GPS receivers, not location transponders. OLPC may > not be able to include GPS, but we should not deny useful technologies to > children merely because we expect a backlash from uninformed armchair > critics. > > - --Ben Ben is spot on. Wad, I'm surprised you are so worried about that... of course including a good location transponder would be a /real/ power drain. If we are worried about transparency of 'location', we should have a visible indicator every time an XO calls home over the network -- this is something I actually really want to see, and significantly more relevant than a gps hardware light would be. SJ
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