[olpc-help] xmas xo demo

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Doug Jones wrote:
> 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...
> 
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> 

Sheesh ... I'm trying to resist going for another one before December
31st. :)

But seriously folks, if you've got a unit in your hot little hands, show
it off! The folks in Taiwan will make more, right?