One lap top per child. Any nautical use?

bumblefish

bumblefish

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As the one laptop project has announced an intention to sell the laptop to the public in exchange for one going to the 'developing world' will there be any marine applications developed? I was thinking about AIS, weather fax and plotting software. If the market was potentially large enough it might encourage the linux people to get to work on some suitable ports or software?
 
If we could buy them at USD100 (£50) .... or even USD150, I'm sure we could find many good uses for them!

But as we know, USD will equal £ if and when ever sold here. Then there's the implication that (effectively) you would actually pay double that. At that point, unless for altruistic reasons, it starts to look unattractive.

Vic
 
I'm not sure that the OLPC has enough power for modern chart plotting software, so it's unlikely that the big companies would be interested in porting their software. However they do appear to be very rugged pieces of equipment and you do get a lot of computer for the money, as there are massive economies of scale involved.

The usual open-source caveats would apply. You need enthusiastic, competent programmers to write the software, and it can be difficult to get support. Also, I doubt that they would be able to use commercially available digital charts, as C-Map, Garmin and co would be worried about people decoding their charts and giving them away on the internet.

On the plus side the kind of registration problems mentioned by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in Sailing Today this month are unknown in the world of Open Source software, and software written by someone in their spare time often seems to be better than software that's been written according to a spec written by salesmen, and completed before an impossible deadline.

A 'repeater' system that took NMEA data and displayed it should be fairly straight forward to create, whether it's AIS, speed or GPS location.
 
Seaclear, while not open source, is free, very good and runs on quite feeble laptops. I used to use a 5 year old Dell which can't have been more than about 100Mhz. Charting, AIS - all fine. Low res screen was a bit of a pain, but only a bit.

I am sure if there were a "market", in the sense of a population of non-Windows users out there the open source (or don't-care-if-its-open-source but free, which is what most folks mean by it) software would come.
 
[ QUOTE ]
If we could buy them at USD100 (£50) .... or even USD150, I'm sure we could find many good uses for them!

But as we know, USD will equal £ if and when ever sold here. Then there's the implication that (effectively) you would actually pay double that. At that point, unless for altruistic reasons, it starts to look unattractive.

Vic

[/ QUOTE ]

If/when they become available you have to buy 2 - you get one, a child gets one.

It's quite a different interface to what you expect from windows/mac/linux window managers. Takes some getting used to.
 
5 year old dell would have been significantly more than 100MHz + probably nearer to 1 GHz. Even back 12 years ago the laptop was abt 300 MHz + and I have one from that era + and it works fine with Maxsea, but struggles with the AIS.
 
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