[tt] NYT: Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:50:21PM -0400, Premise Checker wrote:

> Why do you think there still isn't a global mesh protocol, Eugen?

It's not easy to do, and there's still no real demand for it.
It might be a psychological issue -- ArpaNet set out with a
very different fitness profile from a locally dense geomesh
of wireless nodes, operating at relativistic speeds. What
people currently do is hacking IPv4 on embedded nodes, which
is way trapped on a local minimum.
 
> And why is existing educational software so awful? Is it because doing so 

I don't know, perhaps because the overap of the sets of good programmers 
and good textbook authors is very small, and there's no market for it?

> is next to impossible? What about the free-market test? As long as folks 

There doesn't seem to be a good market for it.

> shell out hard cash for software, it's good enough for them, I should 
> think.

Look at a simple physics prop like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZNTgglPbUA&eurl
Where can you buy it? For how much? Where's the tablet PC with
a wireless mesh for a class to run it on? There isn't any.

And that's just a tiny subset of a subset for a real A Young Lady's
Illustrated Primer.
 
> I'm not so sure that surfing the Web is a total waste of time, though it 
> can be a waste of *my* times, that's for sure. I'll merry hyperlink and 

For some reason, most of technology gets used for viewing porn and violence,
at least by young males. This is no different for boys in the developing
world. Even in absence of Internet access, such content tends to hop
from handheld to handheld, and travel widely.

> find a lot of interesting stuff, but a great deal of it just reports 
> incremental changes. Indeed, a great deal of postings on Transhuman Tech 

There's lots of great stuff happening out there that needs to be
on transhumantech, but because we only have some 5-odd key contributors
that gets unreported. Too bad, we could really use quite a few more
contributors.

> are of this variety. I do wish I could get a fix on the *major* 
> developments in the past five or ten years! None have struck me as being 
> anywhere nearly as important as Mozilla, the first graphics browser, which 
> came something more than ten years ago.

I've been very much onboard of VR since mid-80s, and since very recently
Second Life and OpenCroquet have started to deliver.
 
> Maybe cellphones have had as great a social impact as the Web, but I'm not 
> sure about that.

I ignore them. At least, until we'd get decent Augemented Reality platforms.
 
> Such things as truly usable speech recognition software seem to be forever 
> five or ten years ahead.

No wonder, real speech recognition is AI-complete.
 
> Ditto for smart drugs and many, many other things.

No way to make the brain work better with a small simple molecule,
or even with a cocktail of small simple molecules. At least, not on
the long run, not without paying the price.
 
> On the other hand, a good hand-held readers for books does seem to be 

Not so good, since DRM-crippled. Defective by design. But I'm rooting for the
pirates. We'll win, eventually.

> developing along. Still, there had better be a lot more available content 
> before I'll get one myself. AND I'd demand to be able to get books at 
> used-book prices!

I demand to get free access to much of what other people have published,
in a labor of love.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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