Charbax.com

Sugar has been spun off of the main OLPC branch anyways starting months ago. So I guess it should be kind of natural, especially during this financial and lending crisis, that the main OLPC branch shouldn’t be the one carrying all the software load in terms of paying for further Sugar development. With the latest Sugar release for the OLPC version 8.2.0, Sugar for OLPC is now stable.

Sugar Labs as I understand it is now tied closer with Red Hat’s Fedora project, and it’s being made for more platforms such as to run on those netbooks and other devices.

OLPC needs to focus on content, on educational strategies, to develop pedagogical guidelines to present to teachers as recommendations for how to successfully implement OLPC, how to use computers and the Internet in education. Taking into account all the different environments, some places that don’t have a lot of Internet, some places that don’t have good electricity, some places where kids have more or less troubles to educate themselves.

OLPC needs to continue revolutionizing the computer industry. That is why XO-2 is very important. Lowering the amount of components in the laptop should be a priority. Focus should be put on engineering and firmware programming, making of drivers for the next hardware.

You can’t just sit back and wait for Intel to make the $100 laptop. Intel’s current stragtegy is only to pull up the pricing of the average netbook with all kinds of whistles that they are introducing with the approval of the new Atom Z processor. Such features as the Intel Classmate tablet, Sony Vaio P, MSI hybrid netbook, Vista.. all those things are very carefully designed by Intel to inflate the price of the average netbook sold. Intel and the rest of the established computer industry are loosing huge profit margins on having to provide netbooks instead of the previous years mid-range laptops that had dual-core, high power consumption graphics and all kinds of gimmicks that could push up pricing. Thanks to OLPC, the laptop industry’s profit margins are quickly going away.

OLPC needs to pull the pricing further down and as quickly as possible. I believe that AMD has pretty much conceded that they are not very much interested in lower laptop prices. AMD netbooks are higher priced. AMD doesn’t seem to come with the next more optimized lower cost and lower power successor to the AMD Geode LX900.

OLPC needs to look for a cheaper, simpler and lower power architechture. I believe that one can only be ARM Cortex A8 or A9 depending on the planned timing of initial large scale hardware deployments of XO-2 model. There are a whole range of companies now making those ARM Cortex A8 processors. Marvell for one has probably already proposed such solutions to OLPC, Texas Instruments has a good one, Qualcomm and Freescale are demonstrating such prototypes at CES right now. Laptops to be sold commercially with profit at $199, thus could probably be built by a non-profit at half that price when all components are optimized, when the screen is the latest Pixel Qi, when a deal for mass production is signed.

Software for XO-2 could be optimized and tweaked best by Google, IBM or some other companies like that who contribute to embedded Linux projects. Using Google Android I think would be the perfect solution. Google wants more Internet access to more people in developing countries. If Google themselves don’t soon release the reference design for the $100 XO-2 Google Android laptop, then OLPC should do it as a priority. Using Android as the platform for XO-2, this way you know you get the best possible software optimizations by the worlds definite best software company.

Killing Intel and Microsoft off in the process would just be a very welcomed bonus.

In these times of the global economic turmoil, Charbax consults with his economic advisors to present the world with an economic rescue package that may or may not save the economy.

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The way Google works is quite simple:

1. The know what people click on, they know people clicking are real people and not machines, they know how long time people spend on each site. Basically Google monitors how interesting everything is on the Internet, it’s not like some Google robot is magically doing all the work.

2. Links only matter partially to determine the importance and relevancy of a page. What matters more is if people clicking on those links think they are getting relevant information when they get to the page.

The way Google monitors that is quite simple:

- Google Toolbar.

- Users are logged into their Google Account all the time so when interacting with Google services, they know. When clicking on search results, they know. If you then click on other search results or go back to Google services, they know you are probably not browsing that page anymore.

- Google cookies. 

- Google Chrome statistics.

Do I think it’s bad Google knows all these things about everyone on the Internet? I think it’s awesome, this is absolutely fantastic and I think it is great.

Why? I think someone has to do it. And if Governments around the world such as Obama or the EU are too lazy to do this work, then I trust Google is the best company to take care of this very important responsabillity. I trust Google isn’t going to do evil things with this, but mostly use it to bring more and more relevant search results.

Do I think Google Search is the end of innovation on the Internet? Nope. I think something like Google Searchwiki will take over: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html

You see, I don’t care about HTML JPG designs, AJAX gimmicks, CSS styles, even worse Flash interfaces! I want my whole web in a totally standard interface that just consist of one typeface, one interface for the whole thing. I am getting sick and tired of all the design on the Internet, let’s make things simple. When I search Dvorak, I want his content, I don’t want to look at his stupid blog templates.

Yup, it’s kind of like the next level of RSS, but a new standard. And centralized. And no, it’s not going to be Wikipedia.

Although the number of registered users of http://barackobama.com is impressive, their multi-user blogging portal at http://my.barackobama.com is cool. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of blog posts that were actually read or how much those user-generated blog posts actually mattered.

As far as I understand it, the way Barack Obama’s campaign had the worlds best usage so far of the Internet in a campaign (second best could be Ségolène Royal’s lost french presidential campaign), has been especially to collect money in the form of millions of small donations. And to do the online organizing of getting out the vote efforts in the form of getting millions of supporters to personally call voters (which is better then robocalls), knock on their doors, do meet-ups, know about local events and stuff like that. Also the usual most effective way to communicate with supporters has been newsletters.

Putting some wiki, chat or user-generated blogging type blog comments on http://change.gov I think may be more of a gimmick then really useful and powerful. Live webcasts from the White House would probably be an awesome highlight and a worlds first. Already right there, they could provide hundreds of interesting hours from those meetings, those deliberations, commities, speeches, diplomatic meetings and all that.

I think they need to create an online congress where every citizen is a representative, can vote on all ideas, can suggest ideas, can amend ideas, express themselves in meaningful ways. Then all this needs to be done using clever algorithms to promote the good ideas automatically using clever new wisdom of the crowds algorithms. On the Internet, one vote shouldn’t count as one vote, votes should count proportionally with the influence and activity each verified user has on the rest of the community. This way, an algorithm can automatically filter out the experts and the representatives.

Here is what I think we should do:

1. Nationalize all banks progressively. Start with taking major equity, and move progressively towards all major banks being controlled by the state.

2. Introduce a new worldwide currency. This currency should be digital only, it should have a bunch of guidelines and should be managed in total transparancy. No financial speculation should be allowed. It should be the currency to serve humanity, to serve society. There should be very specific rules for people to be able to exchange their old currencies to this new worldwide currency. Eventually, all developped and emerging countries should all use that same currency.

3. Amend the worldwide human rights to include the right for food, the right for global healthcare and the right for global education. Those problems can be fixed and should be fixed very quickly using basic computerised models to effecively target all the food, healthcare and education to the places in the whole world that need it.

4. All countries should agree immediately to stop all pollution. Access to the new worldwide currency also requires full protection of the environment.

You can see my IFA 2008 video coverage at http://techvideoblog.com/category/ifa/?year=2008

So far highlights in popularity are that my video about the $98 chinese laptop was posted on one of the worlds biggest tech news site at http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/04/2232225 and on the Danish biggest news papers websites frontpage the whole week at http://fpn.dk/web_tv/forbrug/?movieId=16642&Id=1427767

First episode of the new series on your Internet channel. These are going to be a whole bunch of videos of me talking about all kinds of relevant and newsworthy topics. First topic is Joe Biden, the new vice-presidential candidate for the Democrats. I try to give him some good advice if he wants to help Barack Obama win the election.

DivX HD 1280×720 3.5mbit/s: Play, Download (169mb)

Flash versions (high quality): Youtube

Flash versions: Blip, Viddler, Putfile

Intro music Blup by http://maf464.free.fr

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt just said Google is delivering 1.3 million minutes of videos on youtube every minute. Source is the second video on this page: http://cnbc.com/id/26182232

Which basically means Youtube has a constant bandwidth output average of 390 gbit/s if you consider each Youtube stream is at 300kbit/s and that more and more of the streams are in “high quality mode” which uses a bit more bandwidth and some of Youtube’s videos are delivered in H264 to devices like the iphone, Tivo, Apple TV and stuff like that.

So my estimates were way low.

That 1.3 million number basically means Youtube constantly has the equivalent of 1.3 million viewers. Which might be low compared to any big established TV station, but it’s huge considering the Youtube infrastructure provides a different customized on-demand stream to every user.

Let’s guess that the average Youtube view is something like 3 minutes long. Divide 24 hours by 3 minutes, you’ve got 480 times 1.3 million views on Youtube in average per day. That amounts to a current average of 624 million views on youtube per day. When Google acquired Youtube, there was about 100 million views on Youtube per day, so if the numbers are true, Google might have increased Youtube’s bandwidth by more then 6 times since they acquired Youtube about two years ago.

One source said average Youtube user watches something like 40 videos on Youtube per month.

So if that statistic of 40 views per user average per month is true, Youtube would have 468 million different users watching over 18 billion videos on Youtube each month. Which would mean each Youtube user watches in average 2 hours of videos on Youtube each month, which still would be low compared to the average 90 hours that the average person in USA watches TV each month (3 hours in average per American per day).

A constant 390gbit/s average bandwidth stream from Youtube would mean that Youtube uses 126 petabytes of bandwidth each month.

If Google is paying as much as $0.10 in average per GB delivered, they are probably paying less then that, but let’s say the worldwide average may be $0.10 per GB, considering there are lots of storage and networking equipment that they have to constantly add to their big Youtube server farms, then at 126 petabytes per month, Youtube’s bandwidth costs might be around 10 million dollars per month right now.

If you consider Internet Video-On-Demand might replace traditionnal TV at some point, Youtube might still have a potential to expand by a hundred times when that transition happens. And all the while people will require the videos to be delivered in HD quality directly onto people’s HDTVs using a Video-On-Demand set-top-box which will consume 10 times as much bandwidth with at least 3.5mbit/s per 720p HD quality video stream. So potentially Youtube’s bandwidth consumption could increase by 1000 times during that transition.

AMD doesn’t really push the low cost laptop idea as I think they should. AMD could have taken the Geode based OLPC and produced millions of commercial versions of it by now, but they don’t do it. AMD doesn’t like the idea of large quantities delivered at low if not non-existant profit margins to replace their own existing market share in much more expensive higher power processors.

If you need this size, then you’ve found the small laptop that is for you. But I don’t like that small keyboard, and to me 7″ is just too big for the pocket, and it’s too small for being really productive. For watching videos while on-the-go 7″ is a good size, but the latest AMD Turion based laptops probably are going to be much more expensive the similar size and weight 7″ Archos video playing devices which also have basic browser and WiFi for casual browsing.

That is my basic complaint with the whole Microsoft and Intel name that is the UMPC, or the netbook. Too big for pocket, too small for productivity.

What I want in a laptop, is at least 14″ and a full sized keyboard. Otherwise it’s just not going to be confortable to do stuff like posting this message to this blog post. Then I also want a pocket device that does everything while on the go in situations that I don’t want to use a laptop, such as in public transportation, while not going to/from work, while not going to/from study, while walking in the streets, while walking around in the city without having to carry a bag for the laptop.

And if I want to be slightly more productive using a pocket device, I want to use a full sized foldable USB or Bluetooth keyboard at least.

Small keyboards are not for adults to be productive. For children to play games and explore the web, given their small fingers, and given that they probably will not type text very fast before being at least semi-teenager, then small keyboards are ok for young children. For those types of children that do not want to type this type of post on this type of blog.

This very compact video player has a 2.4″ screen, VGA to Full DVD resolution DivX playback, 20GB, compact flash, TV output, games. Someone even found a way to install a Nintendo NES games emulator.

This video was originally released in 2004 at http://archosfans.com