OLPC: What can we learn from it?

I think one of the biggest innovations on this project has to be the display technology developed by Mary Lou Jepsen. It is a a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. And to top it all it uses only 2 w of power and costs only $40 to manufacture. That apart from the sheer audacity that the team displayed in its vision, has to be applauded.

Five countries have so far pledged its support for this project, though it's a pity that the Indian government decided not to (because of a fair amount of lobbying by the Wintel camp, I heard.) Even if the project fails to have much of an impact on third world education, as most of its detractors have voiced, once the technology gets into the commercial realm, it will have a large impact laptop prices overall. Unfortunately, I believe, this laptop itself cannot be made commercial...

Here's a link to a talk by Michail Bletsas, the Chief Connectivity Officer for the project.

Google to answer no more...

Google is bidding a quiet adieu to Google Answers.

No explanations have been provided to the reason behind this move, but wonder if Yahoo! will follows suit or is this a shot in their arm? Interestingly Rashmi Sinha had posted an entry on her blog about Yahoo! looking for a lead designer for their Answers team, and one of the comments was about potential experience issues with the concept itself. Might be something worth pondering about...

The history of Human Computer Interaction

I need to bookmark this paper for later reference...

Microsoft to license the 2007 Microsoft Office User Interface

This is a new one, and about as close as M$ has ever come to open-source I think. In a new move, Microsoft has announced that it will be licensing the user interface for MS Office 2007. This means as a developer (developing an non-competing product) you could use the MS ribbon idiom in you application as long as you comply with some style restrictions imposed by the license. This is interesting as many of the MS UI paradigms were aped by a number of applications, thus giving the UI more eyeballs and making M$ applications seemingly intuitive. With a big shift in paradigm from M$'s end they do feel that users will find it difficult to adapt to the new UI, so this is probably a way to evangelize the new UI. That's my reading of this announcement.

I personally have not used the ribbon interface yet, so I can't comment on the merits and demerits yet, but maybe some of you can...

Get a refund on windows XP

Interesting incident about an 'open-sourcer' getting a refund for a copy of Windows XP which he never intended to use...