Bills philantrophy...
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| Author | Content |
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| Libervis Mar 17, 2006 7:50 AM EDT |
I try to believe anything is possible (until proven otherwise), but I don't think we'll see that happening any time soon (Bill coming onboard with the project like 100$ "one laptop per child". Bill wants to be a winner and there is absolutely nothing he'll let come on his way to that goal. Gates Foundation is another organization he founded to be a winner and indeed, he's considered the biggest philantrophist in the world. Less people know, though, that the money he "gave away" he practically stole from the world through unethical business. My sister told me Bill was in Croatia this week (curiously enough just a week after Richard Stallman visited us here). She saw him on TV talking about technological progress in Croatia. Again, a fallacy.. how can he talk about technological progress and at the same time mock the project that is trying to help spring exactly that in underdeveloped African countries? So much for his philantrophy as well as honesty and integrity. The guy is just sick with greed for power and control - literary - the world domination. Ballmer doesn't seem to be any better. And Microsoft as a corporation reflects that. However, all this outrage about Microsoft may be a waste of emotions. Here's an example of a project that fights MS in the best way. It works on something great that uses Free Software and cooperation to help the developed world, completely ommitting Microsoft. Isn't that a good way to fight them? So.. I have an idea for how could many of us help that "one laptop per child" project, those of us who run some websites at least (including LXer.com). OLPC laptop displays will have a rather nonstandard display resolutions which may not work with many web sites. The idea is to make our sites compliant with those displays or put a mechanism in place that will enable sites to detect when they're accessed with an OLPC laptop so that they can show a compliant version of their layout to them. By compliant I mean the site layout that would look good and usable on those small screens. I posted about the idea here: [url=http://www.libervis.com/newbb viewtopic.topic_id 954 forum 27 post_id 6665.htm#forumpost6665]http://www.libervis.com/newbb viewtopic.topic_id 954 forum 2...[/url] Thanks Daniel |
| jwbr Mar 17, 2006 8:40 AM EDT |
Regarding: "So.. I have an idea for how could many of us help that "one laptop per child" project, those of us who run some websites at least (including LXer.com). OLPC laptop displays will have a rather nonstandard display resolutions which may not work with many web sites. The idea is to make our sites compliant with those displays or put a mechanism in place that will enable sites to detect when they're accessed with an OLPC laptop so that they can show a compliant version of their layout to them. By compliant I mean the site layout that would look good and usable on those small screens." This is a fabulous idea and exhibits what I think will be the factor that in the end helps Free, Open Source Software win in the end: Turning a problem into a challenge instead of harping on the negative. Thanks for posting this! Ideas that may help: * Create a logo program for OLPC-websites, much as is done for W3C HTML compliance. * Put a link to a site describing the OLPC project below the graphic, so others can become informed about the project. * Another part of compliance should be minimization of the amount of data transferred (fewer if any images), simplicity of design, and minimization of energy-consumptive active content (e.g., JavaScript) and animations to reduce power consumption. It seems to me that the OLPC project may be interested in helping define these requirements. Think of what a benefit this could be to users of the laptops if Wikipedia were to adopt such a standard! |
| Libervis Mar 17, 2006 12:43 PM EDT |
Indeed, thank you jwbr. Great ideas too! We can definitely get in touch with the OLPC project to cooperate with them on that. It would be necessary actually because they are the ones that will be putting software on those laptops and we need to ensure that there is a way to identify those laptops to web sites. I think a simple modification of the browser user agent should do it. Instead of identifying as normal firefox it should identify as an OLPC laptop and then a website can easily be made to recognize this and send a proper OLPC-compliant page to the browsers running on it. Most of the material (such as some basic guidelines to making the site OLPC-friendly) can be easily done in a wiki while images and logos should be the least of a problem (I can do some, and I have a friend good at this stuff, and anyone from the community can send some proposals too). Anyway, when this starts going you'll sure be notified as the news would be sent to lxer.com of course. :) Thanks for the thumbs up. Daniel |
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