On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Clare Richardson <<a href="mailto:clare@girlstart.org">clare@girlstart.org</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I agree that it's important for kids to be able to do all they want to do on the laptop! :) YouTube is quickly becoming not just for fun, but a classroom tool as well.<br>
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It's my understanding that while the XO laptop does not ship with the Adobe Flash plugin (which is required for playing YouTube videos) because it is proprietary software, you should be able to install it yourself:<br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Flash_Player" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Flash_Player</a><br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Adobe_Flash#Installation" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Adobe_Flash#Installation</a><br>
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I confess I've never tried it on ours though!</blockquote><div><br>I have. As technical things go, this is a fairly easy task, and the instructions are both clear and complete. (or at least they were.)<br><br>However, I (and my kids) found it less useful than we were expecting.<br>
<br>My kids already have other 'real' computers to use, and have become, I must admit, a bit spoiled. <br>Flash is just the first layer of the dependency stack most Flash-using sites demand. Yes, having Flash will make some more sites usable, but that just means the set of unusable sites changed. Instead of being frustrated over the sites that won't run without Flash, they become frustrated by the sites that demand both Flash and a browser which supports multiple windows. Install Opera to cover that and now we get complaints about something else.<br>
And, (not meaning to start a software freedom discussion here) in the end a web site using proprietary plugins will work correctly only on the equipment that web site chooses to support, meaning I (my kids) will always be unsupported beggars unless we upgrade to meet their demands. And upgrade again when the next version of Flash is released.....<br>
I'm interested in the XO because I want them to have to at least have another choice.<br><br><br>Flash silently disappeared when I upgraded to 656. Nobody noticed but me.<br><br></div></div>-- <br>Steve Holton<br><a href="mailto:sph0lt0n@gmail.com">sph0lt0n@gmail.com</a>