[olpc-help] xmas xo demo

[Doug Jones]

One of the ways you can support a community is to make the community 
larger and more diverse.

I have had surprising (to me anyway) success in convincing friends and 
family to join G1G1.

Soon I will walk into a large extended family gathering, for the purpose 
of exchanging gifts and other forms of holiday cheer.  I will have a 
delightful little gizmo hidden under my coat.


Getting people to buy into G1G1 can be tricky.  Long circular debates 
can ensue, going nowhere.  I've heard everything.  If it's listed on the 
OLPC Myths page, I've heard it.  And more.

Some people are dubious about the educational or charitable aspects of 
the project.  Some people are dubious of anything that smacks of 
idealism in any form.  But even if you don't have the time to debunk all 
of the myths they can think of, sometimes you can shift gears on them.

When you're talking to someone about OLPC, and you see them going into 
instrumental reasoning mode ("How does this mesh with my immediate 
goals?"), find a way of making the XO mesh for them.


I have a friend who is into outdoors things, hiking, off-roading, car 
camping.  Also into photography, and mapping, and other techie things. 
He sometimes carries high-tech things far off grid.

I handed him my XO, and said, "You need to take one of these with you." 
  And then I told him why.

The ruggedness of the device is an obvious selling point.  The 
daylight-readable screen is another.  Size and weight is another.  But 
now we go much deeper.

It's a general-purpose computer, capable of doing anything any other 
general-purpose computer can do, within the limits of memory and 
processor speed.  So any kind of task that involves data, whether images 
or maps or whatever, can be done on the XO, assuming the community can 
provide the appropriate software.  ("Just don't expect to be quickly 
editing really large images or videos on it,"  I hinted.)

It has USB, so his 47-way camera card adapter will work with it.  His 
dinky USB microdrives will work with it.  His GPS unit will talk to it. 
  His cameras will talk to it.  Gizmos nobody has even thought of yet 
will talk to it.

Furthermore, it's a general-purpose power management hub.  It's easy to 
get power into it, and store it there.  (I can't demonstrate the yoyo 
charger yet, or the little folding solar cell panels, but he grasps 
those ideas right away.)  Once the power is in there, you can use it to 
run, and to recharge, myriad other devices.  Cameras, mp3 players, 
cellphones, anything else that can be charged through USB.  You've 
already stopped carrying film, now you can stop carrying batteries too.

This fellow puts a lot of images and videos on the internet, on his own 
website and other places too.  And he uses email a lot.  He has a 
cellphone that can be used for these things while he's on the road, but 
the bandwidth is rather limiting, even when he can find a connection at 
all.  He has to drive all the way home to really take care of these 
things effectively.

All that changes with G1G1.  He gets one free year of T-Mobile Hotspot 
access, so he doesn't need to go home, he just drives to a Starbucks or 
whatever and then he's got broadband, on a much bigger screen than his 
cellphone provides, a bigger keyboard (plug in a full size USB keyboard, 
mouse too, if he wants), and a much larger choice (potentially) of 
software to use.  Of course he can use the Hotspot service with any 
computer, not just the XO.

The Hotspot service normally costs $350, they say, so spend $400 on G1G1 
and it's like you get the laptop for $50.


SOLD.


And now somebody's uncle, who may not ever think much about the children 
the XO was designed for, will soon have something marvelous to share 
with his young nieces and nephews, who will never be bored with his 
visits again.



Have some other friends who have a boat.  They plan to spend a year 
sailing across the Pacific soon.

Radar, satellite phone, GPS, all manner of nav gear, banks of batteries, 
solar panels, even a wind-powered generator, they are well equipped. 
They have regular laptops too.  And handheld GPS, just in case the big 
GPS unit fails.

They are receptive to the things I mentioned before.  But I go further.

"You're a thousand miles from land, and a big storm hits.  Rogue wave 
perhaps.  You have a lot of damage, major electrical failure, lose a lot 
of supplies.  You're still afloat, can still raise sail.  You still have 
a compass, might be able to find the handheld GPS and its spare 
batteries, or the sextant, or the charts, but maybe not.  You might find 
yourself sailing in a crippled 19th century boat.  What do you do?"

Then I point out how much better off they would be if they had done that 
extra layer of contingency planning, and gotten one XO, with one SD card 
containing charts for the entire planet, and one yoyo charger, and one 
folding solar panel, and one USB GPS unit, and stashed them in a 
watertight bag, firmly attached to an extra life jacket so it will 
float, in one of the lockers.

It may not have all of the features of a full-blown nav system, but it's 
so much cheaper that the cost is negligible, it's more rugged, it's far 
easier to power up, it can be used to charge up other devices, and it's 
a heck of a lot better than the 19th century.



Somebody else I know was talking about the Amazon Kindle.  This person 
likes Jane Austen.  I asked, can you get 'Pride and Prejudice' on that 
thing?  The answer is, of course you can.  That book hasn't been out of 
print in ages.

Next time I see that person, I will pull out my XO, in ebook mode, open 
to the first page of that book.  (I already downloaded it, from Project 
Gutenberg, and already started reading it on the XO.)  By then I will 
have downloaded more books.  The complete works of Jane Austen perhaps. 
  Lewis Carroll.  Mark Twain.  Edgar Allen Poe.  Locke.  Hobbes.  Who 
knows how far I will take this obsession with books.

Perhaps I succeed in filling an entire SD card with books.  This 16GB 
unit will hold about 20,000 I figure.  Only a fraction of the books 
available for free so far.

I will ask them, how much would it cost you to download that many books 
on your Kindle, even just the ones out of copyright?  The answer is, I 
suspect, hundreds of thousands of dollars.  The Kindle don't do PDF, or 
djvu, or txt, or anything else that's free.  (The real answer is, nobody 
would ever do this.)


One more thing you can point out to people:  Yes, perhaps something like 
the XO will be available commercially someday.  But, something like 2/3 
of the selling price of a commercially available computer goes to 
middlemen, so the selling price of a commercial XO might even be more 
than $400.  And don't look for any T-Mobile giveaways after G1G1.  Only 
one week left, folks...



Time to grab an XO and go...