Re: [fonc] OLPC related
: Re: [fonc] OLPC related Loup Vaillant wrote: So at least, you can salvage your granma's TV, making the whole set a bit less expensive. Great news! (I don't think those connectors were in the video I saw on the site.) Thinking over what I wrote last night, I am getting much more excited about the disruptive educational and democratic possibilities of this device. While the builtin sensors of the XO have the appeal of a standard platform to develop for, I remembered that the robotics community has a useful range of USB transducers that makes the Raspberry Pi an interesting robotics processor. There is even this: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/USB_Sensor David ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org mailto:fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org mailto:fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OLPC related
The Raspberry Pi people have my full support. Certainly I would like children to have the same free access to their computers that the Sinclair Spectrum/BBC Micro generation had and this is normally not the case even if they have a PC of their own. But while the $25 price tag is a necessary condition, I am not sure that it is a sufficient one. In my talks about the OLPC and related projects, I like to point out that we had three interesting computing communities in the 1970s with a shared language, a shared platform and some communication system. The AI researchers had Lisp, their PDP-10 and the Arpanet. The Unix guys had C, their PDP-11 and VAX machines with Unix itself and the UUNET. The microcomputer people had Basic, their personal computers and magazines. It is interesting to me how much the limitations of the micro people actually led to an extra level of learning. You could get some program over the Arpanet or UUNET and install it in your machine without looking at it, but while typing something in from a magazine listing you would get some impression of it even if you didn't pay much attention. Of course, not all Lisps or Basics were the same so often you get to figure out how to change stuff to work in the system you had. I don't think having Debian on the Raspberry Pi machine will get us the same results. At the very least it would be interesting to have a programming language closer to the surface (the scripting pane in the Frank descriptions of the latest Steps report would be an option I would be happy to see). On the hardware side, having to do everything through USB adds a level of complexity that is a real problem. I know some people feel the best way to handle this would be to add something like the Arduino, but access to a simple parallel port on the main machine would be nice. -- Jecel ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
[fonc] OLPC related
Don't usually spam here, but this seems like it may be of interest. $25 ARM computer with USB/HDMI/SD ports, running Ubuntu Linux, aimed at re-introducing computer science (rather than consumer-oriented computing) to UK schools. By one of the authors of the original Elite game. http://www.geek.com/articles/games/game-developer-david-braben-creates-a-usb-stick-pc-for-25-2011055/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2011/05/a_15_computer_to_inspire_young.html___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] OLPC related
The pricing and the processor of Raspberry Pi put it in the league of the XO 1.75. It is an inexpensive platform for the Fedora and Ubuntu communities to compile and run a complete desktop distribution for ARM as dogfood - which is what OLPC needs in the wild. It needs the resources of the West (really the Global North) to make it a programmable device - you need to beg or borrow a keyboard, a USB hub, a mouse, a storage card, (an optional network connection) and a screen with an HDMI input, or a whole computer. So it isn't _really_ as portable as an XO, nor is it quite so easy to play with interesting sensors. I bet it will be a lot less fuss than flashing the boot sector of an Android phone. If I understand the videos on the Raspberry Pi site correctly, it is targetted at creating a new generation of child hackers: the present day equivalent of the bedroom game programmer who used the Sinclair, BBC, TRS-80 or Amiga microcomputers. I guess this meshes with a FONC agenda. It is quite an exciting thing, and my guess is it will sit alongside Sugar on a Stick as a cool way to allow first world kids to have the Sugar / OLPC experience : or even just enjoy viewing the source or hacking with Emacs, Vi, Eclipse, or Squeak. Or, kids who experience it will get motivated to start programming their Android devices. (Also kids could use apt install / yum to turn these tiny boxes into cheap and low power TV game consoles and home media servers.) I am sure those who have been following it longer will have even better ideas. Just my random thoughts. I am getting excited, though I still think netbooks and Arduinos are cooler. Raspberry Pi Foundation is at: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ They have stickers for sale! David ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
