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Alex Hudson wrote:
I would think in most communities, especially in large continents like Africa, people would generally receive TV over a satellite link. Satellite set-top boxes already have the TV output hardware, they sometimes run Free operating systems, have modems and serial ports, and could easily be adapted to allow a keyboard and/or mouse to be plugged in (in fact, Sky systems have come with keyboards in the past). Because they're bigger and don't have the same mobile size constraints, they could also be made cheaper, and the cost of providing general purpose computing facility would likely be most a software one, compared to the extra hardware required in a mobile phone.
I believe you're talking about the richest aspects of developing societies. In many countries people are using standard terrestrial televisions to receive standard signals. The cost of satellite technology is extremely prohibitive. Certainly in Thailand, China, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Brazil terrestrial television is very common. I was referring to the low tech end of TV units.
As for making the units cheaper, yes. This is possible. However, people are already distributing mobile technology for voice communication purposes. Extending functionality to allow for ICT functions (email, word processing, etc) would not involve much in the way of a hardware solution. USB ports already exist in many phones - especially in Japan and Korea - and some phones already include some form of video-out. These two hardware functions and some innovative software would complete the ICT loop.
Granted it's not as portable as a mobile, but a mobile which requires a TV and keyboard to work as a computer isn't really a portable computer unlike the OLPC. Plus, they're still going to need both satellite TV and mobile phones.
Not satellite TV. Just a TV set. The mobile phone is already distributing itself. Rather than suggesting a new technology, I'm suggesting extending existing technologies slightly to allow for vastly extended functionality.
Reading through the Microsoft Research thoughts on this matter, it seems that their approach might favour a *new product* idea. Perhaps a neat "developing nation Windows CE mobile" thing. That's not what I favour.
I think that (a) our current phone hardware can be extended with minimal cost and effort to provide the potential for ICT functionality. I further propose (b) that we can use a cooperative server-based software development model using little shared components to provide what appear to be quite powerful applications. In reality these applications are light-weight front-ends that call lots of light-weight single-purpose services that are usually not running.
I think this could be good for getting lots of functionality into small spaces and for fostering quick application development. As long as the services are well-designed, they would provide really good tools for applications to call. Furthermore, it could be in Java, allowing everything to be totally cross-platform. It would not matter who made the phones or what form of CPU was running the show.
If you think about it, this model could work effectively with Free Software. It would be cooperative software, where application interaction of all sorts would have to be both totally open and well documented. Each new service could be called by all applications, and each application front-end would be really light. It might be possible to create specialist applications are very low cost once a certain critical mass is reached with regards having functional and stable services.
I'm not totally sold on the TV as an output device. Contrary to the figures you quoted, the maximum horizontal resolution for text is somewhere in the region of 400/500 pixels, sometimes less (many older TVs start losing focus, which isn't noticeable on most TV programmes, but very noticeable on computer displays). Plus, the 576 vertical display isn't really either - it's 288 lines per scan, then interlaced. Reading text on an interlaced screen can be horrendous. So, you're talking somewhere nearer QVGA than VGA in my opinion, and mobile phones are already at that resolution (I hear there's a VGA one coming out soon too).
On this point I don't agree. Having used Sinclair Spectrums, C64s, Oracles and (my personal favourite) the Memotech, I have found televisions to be a decent - if imperfect - textual device.
I think televisions work well enough as long as we don't push resolution too far. You made a good point about interlacing, and you are quite correct that this can make text problematic on some occasions. But for a significant amount of time we did manage to display a great deal of textual information on these devices, and I feel confident that we can do so once again.
I also thought that the OLPC project would be better served trying to make a more up-to-date version of the Psion Series 3 or something - those things lasted for weeks on two AA batteries, and you could get some really good software for them. I'm sure I bought mine for something less than £200, and they were always pretty niche machines.
On this point I certainly agree with you. I think the $100 laptop is a *great* idea. However, great ideas do not make great products. It takes a lot of time and careful testing to push out new technology. I've been working on mobile encrypted email platforms for more than six months with a team, and we're building on Mozilla, GPG and Enigmail code. We're only really getting into shape now.
Creating a new laptop with new design concepts and a new operating system...ouch. That's a lot of variables. The suggested time frame just sounds too ambitious, and this is beginning to show with delays and redesign decisions.
I hope the $100 laptop stays on (altered) track. However, I do think it might be along later than people think. Working on something like a Psion Series 3 would bring a product to the market a lot faster. I think extending mobile phones with small hardware alterations and clever software would also give potential benefit.
Shane
- -- Shane Martin Coughlan e: shane@shaneland.co.uk m: +447773180107 w: www.shaneland.co.uk - --- Projects: http://mobility.opendawn.com http://gem.opendawn.com http://enigmail.mozdev.org http://www.winpt.org - --- Organisations: http://www.fsfeurope.org http://www.fsf.org http://www.labour.org.uk http://www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk - --- OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc
Am Saturday, dem 22. Apr 2006 schrieb Shane M. Coughlan:
Furthermore, it could be in Java, allowing everything to be totally cross-platform.
[...]
If you think about it, this model could work effectively with Free Software.
What now? Java or Free Software?
Please read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
Okay, there are free software implementations of Java already, but you still have to be very careful to avoid the "vendor lock in".
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Andreas K. Foerster wrote:
Furthermore, it could be in Java, allowing everything to be totally cross-platform.
[...]
If you think about it, this model could work effectively with Free Software.
What now? Java or Free Software? Okay, there are free software implementations of Java already, but you still have to be very careful to avoid the "vendor lock in".
This is a valid point, but the Free Software versions of Java are working pretty well. I'm not sure that the danger of vendor lock-in is really that high. I am in agreement that serious work needs to be done to to get Java away from vendor specific systems. That work is thankfully well advanced. I believe we're in a very positive place regarding Java these days.
The main thing IMHO is that all modern phones support Java. While PC platforms allow more choice of languages and development, mobile phones are still relatively closed environments. The de-facto standard of Java is not going away anytime soon, and I was not advocating a complete redesign of mobile phones - just extensions to existing technology. We need to start building the freedom somewhere, and a Free, open application set would be a significant start.
Shane
- -- Shane Martin Coughlan e: shane@shaneland.co.uk m: +447773180107 w: www.shaneland.co.uk - --- Projects: http://mobility.opendawn.com http://gem.opendawn.com http://enigmail.mozdev.org http://www.winpt.org - --- Organisations: http://www.fsfeurope.org http://www.fsf.org http://www.labour.org.uk http://www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk - --- OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc
On Sat, 2006-04-22 at 01:18 +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
I believe you're talking about the richest aspects of developing societies. In many countries people are using standard terrestrial televisions to receive standard signals. The cost of satellite technology is extremely prohibitive. Certainly in Thailand, China, Malaysia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Brazil terrestrial television is very common. I was referring to the low tech end of TV units.
I think that's a very simplistic point of view. Satellite technology is not expensive by any means, if anything it's only marginally more expensive that terrestrial technology.
Even in the countries you mention, satellite TV is actually pretty popular. Over half of all households with TV in India have either satellite or cable, for example (mostly satellite).
You have to remember that with satellite, reception is much less of an issue. Particularly across large areas like Africa or South America, satellite is often the *only* way you can receive TV. This effect is particularly noticeable in the poorer rural areas - it's often the large cities that have terrestrial coverage.
I'm not totally sold on the TV as an output device. Contrary to the figures you quoted, the maximum horizontal resolution for text is somewhere in the region of 400/500 pixels, sometimes less (many older TVs start losing focus, which isn't noticeable on most TV programmes, but very noticeable on computer displays). Plus, the 576 vertical display isn't really either - it's 288 lines per scan, then interlaced. Reading text on an interlaced screen can be horrendous. So, you're talking somewhere nearer QVGA than VGA in my opinion, and mobile phones are already at that resolution (I hear there's a VGA one coming out soon too).
On this point I don't agree. Having used Sinclair Spectrums, C64s, Oracles and (my personal favourite) the Memotech, I have found televisions to be a decent - if imperfect - textual device.
I guess you mean Oric, not Oracle ;)
They're ok on a decent TV set. On a bad TV set, they're horrendous. Teletext, for example, uses a really low resolution in order to be readable on any TV.
If you have a clean signal input, like composite or s-video, you can get away with it. If you have to remodulate, you lose. In particular, a modulator will never get the colour timing right, which causes it to bleed horizontally.
It's not that I don't think the technology would work, but that it's never really been used this way and I'm not convinced it's capable. It's one thing for people to have used Atmoses and C64s in the past, but those devices never had to display the web graphically - you can already get phones with QVGA resolution that do that. Amigas and Acorns tried doing it, and they were horrendously unreadable on anything other than a good TV with a scart connection.
Cheers,
Alex.
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Alex Hudson wrote:
On this point I don't agree. Having used Sinclair Spectrums, C64s, Oracles and (my personal favourite) the Memotech, I have found televisions to be a decent - if imperfect - textual device.
I guess you mean Oric, not Oracle ;)
Well spotted! I must have been thinking of Larry...
The Oric was an interesting machine. I have one at home. Apart from that horrific keyboard, I quite liked it. The documentation was also neat. Someday I should google it, and find out more about the history.
I really loved the Memotech. Nice keyboard, fun to work with, great manual. Ah, those were the days...
It's not that I don't think the technology would work, but that it's never really been used this way and I'm not convinced it's capable. It's one thing for people to have used Atmoses and C64s in the past, but those devices never had to display the web graphically - you can already get phones with QVGA resolution that do that. Amigas and Acorns tried doing it, and they were horrendously unreadable on anything other than a good TV with a scart connection.
I don't really think we could expect multimedia beauty from a mobile phone outputting to a TV. Graphical browsing of the web might be optimistic, especially when we consider most web pages are going to be using a resolution that will challenge or wipe the floor with our available resolution. It would become scroll-hell, and the variable text sizes on web pages would lead to a headache. I would not like to try reading Wikipedia on my TV.
The main suggestion is for office productivity applications, not web browsing. Word processing, spreadsheets, database systems. Email is also included as a real possibility. Web browsing - if it were to occur - - would be best suited to text sites designed with jphone layouts in mind. Many large companies already support this, certainly CNN and OSNews provide jphone format information. That should work just fine on a TV.
You have a good point about the technology not having been used this way before. It would be pushing things forward a bit. But we're talking 100mz CPUs, almost 4meg of RAM, and a display device that can handle text elements. I think it'd be fun to see if the 'mobile office' could be done.
Final note: dropped by your website. Interesting blog. I'd love to meet up sometime and chat in person.
Shane
- -- Shane Martin Coughlan e: shane@shaneland.co.uk m: +447773180107 w: www.shaneland.co.uk - --- Projects: http://mobility.opendawn.com http://gem.opendawn.com http://enigmail.mozdev.org http://www.winpt.org - --- Organisations: http://www.fsfeurope.org http://www.fsf.org http://www.labour.org.uk http://www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk - --- OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc
On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 13:44 +0100, Shane M. Coughlan wrote:
The Oric was an interesting machine. I have one at home. Apart from that horrific keyboard, I quite liked it. The documentation was also neat. Someday I should google it, and find out more about the history.
ISTR the history isn't much, "niche machine, advanced in some ways, coulda been a contender" etc.
It was at the point I blew up my Atmos that I realised my knowledge of electronics had some way to go :o) I still have a ROM with Tangerine BASIC tho'...
I don't really think we could expect multimedia beauty from a mobile phone outputting to a TV. Graphical browsing of the web might be optimistic, especially when we consider most web pages are going to be using a resolution that will challenge or wipe the floor with our available resolution. It would become scroll-hell, and the variable text sizes on web pages would lead to a headache. I would not like to try reading Wikipedia on my TV.
True, although I've heard very good things about the Opera browser on mobile phones.
The basic issue with using something "lesser" is that we end up perpetuating the digital divide. I really think that even in developing nations, people need to be using the same applications we are. In some cases, it may even be a necessity - e.g., Firefox is only just gaining support for some languages, IDN domain names, that kind of thing. Acceptance would also be a problem - even here in the UK, many people will refuse to use a GNU/Linux system because it's cheap and they think it's second-rate. The technical features don't even come into the conversation :/
From what I read in blogland, this is one of the big hurdles that the
OLPC project has to overcome. They don't want to create special "low power" software for this laptop, they want to use the standard apps: which means trying to put them all on a diet somehow.
It's been done before - for example, you can install Debian on an NSLU2 box, which is (I think?) a 133MHz processor with 64Mb RAM or something. Granted it's a server-only thing at the moment really, but it shows that there's no really good reason why select apps can't run in such an environment.
BTW, I was hoping to grab you at GLLUG, but unfortunately my weekend was stolen by Microsoft Word(*). We definitely should meet up sometime though ;)
Cheers,
Alex.
(*) This story will be related at my June WYLUG talk, "Programming OpenDocument".