Blogging from an XO
Posted: February 2, 2008 Filed under: Education, hardware, review Leave a comment »The machine had arrived unceremoniously after New Year’s– it was sitting there in a box when we came back from vacation. Intended as a gift for my better half that arrived just a few days too late for the holidays, it was in time for all the controversy surrounding Intel parting ways with the OLPC group.
After installing the battery and charging for the first time, we had a chance to experiment briefly. Her initial impressions were that it was surprisingly unintuitive as far as user interface goes. This blogger agrees: after being used to a standard Windows/OS-X/Ubuntu system, the XO involves a steep learning curve. And that may be perfectly reasonable beause the true target audience for this laptop will be coming to the table with no pre-conceived notions of what a personal computer ought to look like. In that sense the XO is that rare opportunity for system designers: a chance to start with a clean slate, no backwards compatibility, not even the faintest worry about “sideways compatibility” to interop with the applications rest of the world is using, except for the ubiquitious web itself. Perhaps the only familiar moment aside from a stripped down web-browser was launching a command line shell to see which standard utilities were available. Python, ssh, grep: check. ifconfig, emacs, gcc: no dice.
One big problem initially was getting wireless networking. The graphical “neighborhood view” is a great way to visualize other peers and infrastructure access points but the XO could not associate with our DLink draft-N router. A quick Google search revealed that the particular build that ships with this version does not support WPA out of the box. Luckily a work-around was available in the form of a shell script that manually adds the information to config files.
After getting net access and trying out the other included applications, the XO sat on the shelf for a while until the blogger decided to borrow it for a test-drive today. Writing this post can be described in one word as frustrating. The keyboard is dimunitive, which is understandable considering it is designed for children. But it also lacks feedback because of the water-proofing covering the entire layout in an uninterrupted sheet of plastic. Biggest challenge to text-editing is that the system is awfully slow: it makes Vista feel like a streamlined catamaran by comparion. Of all things simple UI tasks such as typing and clicking should be the times when CPU speed does not matter. After all a user can’t “outclick” or “outtype” a modern CPU running at hundreds of megahertz. Apparently on the XO they can: there is noticeable delay between typing and having the words appear in the WordPress edit box. (A problem aggravated by the fact that on an unfamiliar keyboard half the time the first attempt at typing contains a typo.)
There is a lot more to write about the XO but it is clear that these future posts are best not authored on the XO itself.
cemp
MSFT and One-Laptop-Per-Child
Posted: January 13, 2008 Filed under: Education, hardware, markets, MSFT, software Leave a comment »OLPC project is showing a pattern of tumultuous relationships with leading IT companies. In the wake of a widely publicized fall-out with Intel comes a disagreement with Microsoft over the meaning of “dual-boot laptops.” To recap: news reports suggested that OLPC and MSFT were working on models of the XO that could run both the custom Linux operating system and garden-variety Windows. Later Microsoft firmly denied these rumors and suggested the company had a different vision than Negroponte for integrating the Windows platform into the XO system.
Hardly any surprises here because XO laptop and Windows are ultimately irreconcilable concepts. There is no question that earning the loyalty of future PC users in emerging markets is critical for the long-term success in the platform battle. It is important enough to justify giving away copies of an operating system at a loss or trying to co-exist in an open-source ecosystem. But this is going to be a difficult balancing act.
One-Laptop-Per-Child project started out with the goal of producing $100 devices at scale. Some SKUs of Vista cost more than that already. This is a glimpse into the impending reality check for Windows: as the price of hardware drops and the licensing costs for the operating system begin to constitute ever increasing shares of that price, vendors and customers are increasingly motivated to search for alternatives. Cost is a huge factor for OLPC but so is energy consumption and CPU/memory resources– two things that Vista has a voracious appetite for. That’s good news for Intel, AMD and for that matter any company supplying PC components: as long as the software continues to peg capabilities of the hardware, improvements in hardware can make a meaningful impact on the overall user experience and justify the investment. But the target audience for OLPC is not subject to the standard hardware upgrade cycles, nor expected to meet the minimum recommended specs for Vista.
Even if copies of a highly stripped down version of Windows could be made to run efficiently in the highly minimalist specs of the XO and given away for free (similar to the Starter Edition sold at a significant discount at emerging markets where even the basic SKUs are very expensive compared to standard earnings) it will not create a sustainable advantage. Converting those free copies into full-paying licenses down the road will be a challenge to the extent that the premium for a Windows PC over an open-source one is appreciable– exactly the situation guaranteed by Moore’s law and dropping hardware prices.
cemp
Plagiarism 2.0: battleground Internet
Posted: September 25, 2006 Filed under: Education, Internet, Security Leave a comment »It is a frequently repeated truism that Internet has fundamentally altered the way individuals interact. It is another often-cited truism that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The case of plagiarism supports both versions.
College students “borrowing” from others instead of doing original work is timeless. According to TurnItIn, 30% of all papers turned in contain significant amounts of plagiarism. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, these individuals paint their own likeness on the giants’ face, taking credit for the heights reached in the process. This is an ongoing arms race between students who take the dishonest route for a variety of reasons– academic pressure and expectations of peers/parents, writers’ block or more often the burning desire to attend that fraternity/sorority party– and the professors trying to level the playing field and uphold the last remaining scraps of academic integrity in higher education.
As with countless other conflicts, the Internet in this case acts as a neutral arms dealer, arming both sides to the teeth with the latest gadgetry promising to lend an edge over the adversary. Students now have a choice of websites where they can download papers (to use for “inspiration” of course) or even order new work to specification. That’s quite an improvement over the historical status quo when the source of non-original work would have been limited to the immediate social circle of the student. Depending on personal contacts limited both the number of options and increases the risk of getting caught– work previously submitted by classmates may be recognized instanatly as fraud by colleagues in the same department. On the other hand, the defenses have improved too: professors can now take a suspicious submission and Google unusual phrases to check for an obscure uncredited source in cyberspace.
Has the power balance tipped? Two articles published in consecutive Sunday editions of the New York Times sheds some light on this question. In the first article published on Sep 10th, the NYT ran an article describing an experiment with made-to-order paper websites. The authors ordered a paper on the same subject from a sampling of these online businesses and were disappointed overall with the results. (This article titled “At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?” is available from the Times website with registration.) Quality of the writing was described as mediocre or sophomoric at best. Not exactly the right way to get on the academic fast-track but arguably good news for the purposes of stealth: the incoherent engineer stringing adjectives together like Tom Wolfe would a few eye-brows and draw unwanted attention. At least mediocre writing, is like, dude, that’s cool. But there are interesting questions around maintaining a consistent voice/tone: the professor might be worried if the student suddenly converts from new-age mystic to textbook libertarian. (Or is that explained away naturally by the soul-searching process of liberal education?) For repeat customers one would hope these fabricate-a-paper services are using the same author.
So much for the attackers trying to game the system. The second article takes up the defenders’ point of view, focusing on one particular service called TurnItIn which screens submissions for plagiarism. (The company offers other services including online grading and peer review, but the article focused exclusively on the plagiarism detection.) This web-based service compares a new submission against three sources: a propietary database of articles, a growing collection of work submitted by existing clients and some cache of pages from the wild, wild web. It is sophisticated enough to identify passages which are copied with slight alterations– a necessary capability because cosmetic changes are to be expected. Whether they are unintentional artifacts of copying a passage by hand instead of copy/paste or intentional variations introduced to create a veneer of originality, these “deviations” from the original source are the main challenge for detecting plagiarized text. In keeping with good security engineering we assume the attackers (eg cheating students) know their paper is going to be compared against existing sources and anticipate they will resort to intentional misspellings, changing order of words, substituting synonyms from a thesaurus, switching active/passive voice, even throwing ungrammatical decoy sentences to avoid detection.
If that sounds like basic spammer tectics, that’s because there is a parallel with spam here. Spammers have to contend with filters and craft their message to bypass existing defenses. The attackers’ advantage is that the design of filters allows gray-box testing: for client applications, the spammer can purchase the application and reverse engineer it, and for web services they can register for an account and spam themselves with version of a message until one gets through.
Clearly this has not yet dawned on the ghost-writer-for-hire websites. The Times found that at least one of the papers ordered was promptly exposed as fraud by TurnItIn. That is the next escalation in this conflict: ironically the very openness of the system allows it to be subverted. A more astute competitor would subscribe to anti-plagiarism services and verify that their work does not raise any red flags or tweak it until it flies under the radar, charging a few more dollars extra to students for that guarantee and upping the ante for the defenders.
And so the arms race continues.
cemp
