John, On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 9:46 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [I posted bug #8524 re lease activation not working on AP's.] > > Another mechanism that only works on Mesh is sharing "under a tree". > > It's perfectly feasible for four or five kids with laptops, all > sitting under a tree, to share over ad-hoc 802.11 mode. They don't > need a mesh that forwards packets; they can all hear each other on the > radio just fine. Mac laptops do this, for example, using the standard > Zeroconf protocols to assign IP addresses to themselves, and find each > other by name with mdns. > > OLPC's collaboration infrastructure doesn't support this -- or if some > underlying layer does, there's no UI for it. There's no way for the > user to tell the laptop, "Talk to other nearby laptops -- without the > mesh, without an access point". > > Future hardware might well want to discard the complicated and > power-hungry mesh option, since we really aren't using it anyway, > except for lease activation and this "under a tree" scenario. That > would give us lots more choices on future WiFi hardware. If we fix > collab to work in ad-hoc mode under a tree, and when two or more > machines are plugged-together via Ethernet without a server, then not > only will our future products have that choice, but also, our collab > stuff will be MUCH easier to drop into ordinary Linux distros and > applications. > > It seems to me that this would achieve a big piece of OLPC's original > software goals -- to spawn a revolution in free software applications > that support and encourage online collaboration. (Divorcing the > collab support from the OLPC-unique Sugar GUI is also a prerequisite > for making that happen.) > > John > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel >
It's true that multi hoping comes with extra complexity. But it is also true that you can achieve much more with multi hoping than with a 802.11 IBSS. If we really want to encourage freedom and empower people, a multihop wirless network is the only foreseeable communication technology that frees people from the dependency of infra-structure (meaning entities that run that infra and associated costs) and is usable not only under a tree, but in a larger context and coverage area. There are technical challenges in the way, but OLPC should keep pushing this for the benefits it will bring. It seems a perfect fit with the Mission. Also, please note that the scenario you describe: 5 kids under the tree, works for some time now with XOs. Cheers! Ricardo _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel