As the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project works toward a release this year of its low-cost laptop aimed at children in developing nations, work has continued on the device’s Linux-based operating system and on Sugar, the innovative user interface for the radical new laptop design.

The OLPC’s Sugar interface, which runs on top of a lightweight version of Fedora Linux, was carefully designed for use by children. The Sugar project represents a good example of building new interfaces on a Linux core. Some insight into its human interface design goals are available on the OLPC’s wiki, here.

Jim Rapoza, of our sister publication, eWEEK, has put together a 10-image slide show, offering glimpse of the OLPC Sugar interface. The thumbnail image at the top of this article appears to be Sugar’s main desktop. You can view the entire slide show here.

Source: Desktop Linux

~LC

Cory Doctorow: Multiple surveys confirm that females outnumber males online in the US, with “no significant gender gap in Internet usage.”

eMarketer estimates that there will be an estimated 97.2 million female Internet users ages 3 and older in 2007, or 51.7% of the total online population. In 2011, 109.7 million US females will go online, amounting to 51.9% of the total online population.

Link (via /.)

 

Technorati tags: News

Source: Female Internet users outnumber males

Cory Doctorow: Word is that the Canadian government will bring down a new copyright law this spring. The proposal is meant to be similar to the terrible Bill C60 that the last government proposed (and didn’t manage to enact), but even worse, with harsher “anti-circumvention” rules.

“Anti-circumvention” is the idea that it should be illegal to access the stuff you buy, using your own computers and other players, if the person who sold it to you has put some kind of anti-copying technology in place.

This is a feature in the US’s disastrous 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that has done nothing to stop copying or enrich artists, but which has hurt competition, free speech, due process rights, and security research, and even sent an engineer to jail because he talked about the wrong kind of math.

When America created the DMCA, they didn’t have any other examples to look to to see if it would work or not. Canada doesn’t have this excuse. The DMCA is nearly 10 years old and has yet to accomplish any of its nominal objectives.

Canada has no excuse for considering this kind of dumb law. It will hurt Canada’s ability to self-determine (Canadian material locked up with US locks can’t be unlocked by Canadians without permission from American companies), will hurt Canadian artists (legitimate customers turn to piracy when they can’t use the media they bought), hurt Canadian businesses (anti-circumvention makes it illegal to create products that are compatible with locked media), and hurt Canadian research.

Who will oppose the bill? For starters:

* creator groups, such as the CMCC, Appropriation Art, the Documentary Organization of Canada, all of whom have emphasized the need for fair dealing reform, not DRM
* copyright collectives, for whom anti-circumvention is a secondary issue and the educational exception will be viewed as a complete betrayal
* the Quebec copyright and education communities, which has come out against the educational exception at both the ministerial and cultural levels
* the broader education and library communities, who (apart from CMEC and AUCC who have spent years lobbying for the educational exception) recognize that the reform does little to address their real needs
* the retail community, who hoped the government would address private copying (as promised in its copyright policy position)
* broadcasters, who hoped the government would address the ephemeral rights issue
* the privacy community, who will fear that the legal protections for DRM will damage privacy rights
* consumer groups, who will note that anti-circumvention legislation has already had a negative impact on basic consumer interests in Europe and the United States
* the Canadian public, who will wonder why it is still unlawful to copy music onto an iPod or record a television show or a create a parody on YouTube
* the NDP
* possibly the Liberals, who will jump at the opportunity to promote their C-60 bill as a better bill
* possibly the Bloc, who will be unwilling to support a bill that includes the educational exception

Link (Thanks, C Smith!)

Source: Canada’s DMCA coming in this spring?

An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft says there are over 1,000 applications you can run on Windows Vista with few, if any, issues. However, Windows app’s number in the tens of thousands. Add to that the facts that x64 Vista versions don’t support legacy 16-bit code, and that the Windows Resource Protection in Vista breaks some app’s, and you’ve got a big issue. InformationWeek lists a host of workarounds in How To Manage Windows Vista Application Compatibility. Among the tips discussed are Vista’s compatibility mode, its Program Compatibility Assistant wizard, and a little-known form of file and registry virtualization that’s built into the OS. What problems have you encountered with incompatible app’s, and are any issues you’ve encountered deal-breakers that could further roil the already muddied adoption picture for Vista?”

Technorati tags: Windows, News, Software

Source: Working Around Vista App’s’ Incompatibilities

Adobe recently created a media buzz with the announcement of a cross-platform Web-enabled runtime environment, code named Apollo. The environment allows developers to create applications that run directly on the desktop while using content from the Web. Adobe has built Apollo to leverage existing technologies such as Flash, Flex, HTML, and AJAX. Apollo is an amazing concept, but it is not a new idea. Sun Microsystems released Java Web Start in 2001, and the Mozilla Foundation invented XUL when it created Firefox. There are also several startups entering the market. All of their products are geared do the same thing: bring Web applications to the desktop.

Source: Webtop software development: Combining the desktop and the Internet

One thing must be said from the start: Microsoft Vista is a modern operating system that offers a variety of genuine improvements over Windows XP. On top of that, Vista also looks much spiffier than its predecessor. Even so, there are a variety of reasons not to blindly reach for Vista. A consideration of the alternatives is in order, and Linux is at the top of the list.

Source: Penguin At The Window: Linux As An Alternative To Vista

There’s no dearth of Linux distributions. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this. Neither will it be the last. But why the chaos? Why are there more failed distributions than successful ones? Ask the distro guy, Ladislav Bodnar, maintainer of DistroWatch.com. Excuse me if the above sounds like those 15-second commercials during super bowl. As a Linux journalist, DistroWatch is an important tool of my trade. For over half a decade the website has been keeping track of every distribution related activity. And like the many distro’s it lists, DistroWatch is a one-man show. From its humble beginnings, Bodnar has turned DistroWatch into the most comprehensive, and respected, directory of Linux distributions, it is today.

Source: Meet the Distro guy