From an article in the Africa section of the New York Times (login required)
The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.
There are lots of places to read more about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The OLPC wiki is interesting.
Google has integrated writely.com with Google Spreadsheets. Now you visit one place (either http://writely.com or http://docs.google.com) to access your online documents and your online spreadsheets. Here’s more detail from TechCrunch.
The other news, more of a rumor, is that Google is working on offline support for Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The primary weakness of Google’s offerings (or Zoho’s Office offerings), when compared to Microsoft Office, is that they depend on a connection. No connection, no “app” and no access to the documents made with the app. If Google can provide offline access and offline storage (on the computers local disk) that would be synchronized to central once the connection is restored, their offerings would become a serious alternative to Microsoft Office for many more people. Read David Berlind’s analysis here. He quotes fellow ZDNet blogger Garett Rogers here.
This site (edublogs.org) was down for a while, causing much consternation to those teachers and students who depend on it.
Didn’t affect me much. Been up to my armpits in alligators with the usual start-of-the-year school stuff. Now I hope to have more time to read and write….
The Risk Pool: In a recent New Yorker article, my main man Malcolm has written well (per usual) and provocatively (per usual) about how the ratio of those who work to those who don’t is a very good predictor of economic success, whether you’re looking a country’s economy or looking at General Motors. A country can be burdened with too many children to care for or with too many elderly to support. A company can be burdened by its obligations to retirees, generally in the form of pensions or health insurance. As an example, Gladwell attributes Ireland’s recent success to the fact that Irish women are having fewer children:
This relation between the number of people who aren’t of working age and the number of people who are is captured in the dependency ratio. In Ireland during the sixties, when contraception was illegal, there were ten people who were too old or too young to work for every fourteen people in a position to earn a paycheck. That meant that the country was spending a large percentage of its resources on caring for the young and the old. Last year, Ireland’s dependency ratio hit an all-time low: for every ten dependents, it had twenty-two people of working age. That change coincides precisely with the country’s extraordinary economic surge.
He also shows how the big auto companies in the U.S. are heavily burdened by their retirees — so much so, that it is nearly impossible for them to succeed.
In 1962, G.M. had four hundred and sixty-four thousand U.S. employees and was paying benefits to forty thousand retirees and their spouses, for a dependency ratio of one pensioner to 11.6 employees. Last year, it had a hundred and forty-one thousand workers and paid benefits to four hundred and fifty-three thousand retirees, for a dependency ratio of 3.2 to 1.
From a Paul Thurrott SuperSite post:
It sounded like science fiction the first time I heard about it: Windows Vista includes a feature called ReadyBoost that lets you use a USB 2.0-based flash memory device–typically a USB memory key–to speed up the performance of virtually any Vista PC.
This is pretty amazing. Take a flash drive, plug in into a USB port, and expand the available memory (that’s RAM, not storage) without having to open up your PC.
It also looks like Vista will ship in the coming months. Finally.
When I just entered Site Admin to clean up a mess in the middle of this blog, I was prompted to update the database. I did so, and while such things are generally a figment of my imagination, the back-end (the site management stuff) seems a lot quicker. I wonder what changed?
Update: Found some information on the upgrade here.
I don’t like paying for anti-virus software. Heck, I don’t really like paying for software, even though I once made a living off a piece of software.
I’ve been using a free anti-virus program called Anti-Vir on our ancient family PC for years. It seems to do the job, but I hesitate to recommend it to friends because it doesn’t automatically update itself (like the not-free have been doing for years) and many people who use computers can’t be bothered to update.
AOL has just started offering Active Virus Shield, an anti-virus program that is probably good enough and features automatic update. It’s a free download. I just freely downloaded it and installed it on the family PC (after uninstalling Anti-Vir). You must provide an email address on the download page. AOL sends an activation code to that address. Towards the end of the install, you’re prompted for the code. After you’re done with all that nonesense and you’ve completed the install, you have to reboot your computer. It’s somewhat annoying, but I think McAfee and Symantec manage to be just as annoying.
I’m running the full-scan now and I just noticed a little click box, clicked on by default, that reads “Pause virus scan when CPU is busy with other applications.” Good.
The full scan is chugging along. It’ll take a long time on this old PC. Oh, another interesting checkbox, clicked off by default, “Do shut down this computer when finished.” That can be useful.
There are a few programs out there that index the contents of your PC hard drive for quick search. [Mac users who are running Tiger have Spotlight; PC users will eventually have something similar, when Vista makes its way onto their PCs.] I used Google Desktop for a while. It serves up the contents of your drive in the same way that the Google search engine serves up the contents of the Internet, in your browser. It’s an elegant solution, but wasn’t a natural fit for me.
After I got my tablet PC, I spent a little time looking into alternatives and found one I like very much. It’s called Copernic and it’s a free download. It doesn’t use your browser to display search results; it puts up its own window where it is easy to narrow the search by category — to email, files, contacts, pictures, etc. It is also straightforward to refine the search. The search results are very well organized and easy to follow. You can even take actions on some of what it finds. For example, when I search through email, I inevitably end up looking through some garbage. I can delete those emails from the Copernic window. That’s useful.
By default, the part of Copernic that is busy indexing and reindexing the contents of your hard drive suspends itself when the computer is active, watiing until things have been quiet for 2 minutes before resuming. I wish all the scanners and indexers behaved so well. It also installs a little search box in the task bar. In general, I find the interface very natural.
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Just loaded Qumana, the blog authoring tool, on my tablet PC and I’m happy to see that it works the same way as it does on my iBook.. Gotta love those who code for both platforms.
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New Tablet PC
Like many students and teachers at Emma Willard, I’m going to be spending a fair amount of time computing on a Tablet PC.
During the last 2 or 3 years, I’ve spent about 90% of my computing time on one of two Macs. My home computer is an iBook. I’ve been taking it into work from time to time, mainly to take notes at meetings. At work, my primary computer has been an 6-year old G4 tower. I’ve also been using an old PC laptop (with a dead battery) for network administrative tasks and to respond to Outlook meeting invitations (long story).
The new Tablet PC has replaced the old PC laptop. I’m in the process of rearranging my desk so that the Tablet will be front and center, my primary device. I’ll use the G4 for Mac-only applications. That will make me more 50/50: mainly PC at work and mainly Mac at home.
Adjustments: Part I
So now I’m trying to make the Tablet PC comfortable, which for me can mean more Mac-like, but not generally. I customize my Mac interface a lot, too. Part of what prompts me to make changes is that I use many applications and I usually have several applications open at once. I want to be able to find things quickly and figure out the state of my computer quickly.
Among the changes I’ve made:
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