Dynabook hw cost

Matthew Fulmer tapplek at gmail.com
Tue May 22 18:33:23 UTC 2007


On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 09:44:37AM -0500, Howard Stearns wrote:
> I'm thinking not in terms of what it is, but rather how and in what context 
> it would be used:
> 
> * To be used ubiquitously in any context, it needs to not only be small and 
> have good battery life, but it needs to be cheap and "losable."  I think 
> Alan gives an example of taking it to the beach or a raft in the pool. 
> (This also implies replicated external storage.)

XO has all these features.

> * I don't want to just execute prescribed tasks with it, I want to explore 
> and problem-solve (e.g., in the http://nakedobjects.org sense). This may be 
> getting beyond the scope of an electronic book, but I think this is 
> consistent with the general thrust of the dynabook and dynamic languages 
> community. (You could maybe argue that real books with pages are more 
> exploratory/problem-solving than scrolls.) In any case, my feeling (which 
> I'm a relatively recent convert to) is that the best way to do this is with 
> direct manipulation (in both the language sense like self, and the UI sense 
> like the iPhone).

This area is the most lacking area of the Dynabook. Pepsi,
Slate, Magritte, Seaside, Enlightenment[1], Sugar[2],
eToys, Scratch, Tweak, and Croquet are all partial solutions to
the problem, but they are all quite separate so far. This list
is clearly Squeak-biased, as I don't keep up with other
projects. I don't understand what you mean by "the UI sense", so
I cannot comment. 

> * The things I want to explore and manipulate include all media, for which 
> I want to both get existing media/communications (networked) and capture my 
> own (camera and microphone, possibly in stereo or higher degrees for 3D 
> scanning).
> 
> I don't think the hardware -- or the software -- is quite there yet to 
> accomplish all this, but it's getting close. To the degree that one 
> believes that the dynabook hasn't really happened yet, I wonder if it is 
> because we have not yet satisfyingly achieved all the above simultaneously.

I think the hardware is ready, and OLPC does a great job of
uniting the hardware with secure AND extensible software. XO is
definitely the closest thing to the Dynabook that has yet been
created.

[1]: The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are, in my opinion,
the only non-smalltalk graphic framework that can rival Morphic
and Tweak in the area of statically composable models, views,
and behavior. However, being C, it cannot really do post-load
composability. It allows composition all the way until
load-time.

[2]: Sugar, the XO default shell. 

-- 
Matthew Fulmer -- http://mtfulmer.wordpress.com/
Help improve Squeak Documentation: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/808



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