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anycar anylane anywhere drivers

Long long ago, so long ago that no body could say how long ago, thousands of people from China, Rome, France and India climbed up a mountain somewhere near Cripple Creek, Colorado and built houses to live in and lived there. The mountain town elected a Mayor who did everything to make life comfortable for the citizens except build a roadway to the rest of the world.

They were an enterprising lot. They were intelligent. They were hardworking. They found a way to generate electricity, invented and built their own automobiles and lived in prosperous isolation to the rest of the world, preserving their original customs in every way possible.

The Mayor established a China District for those from China who climbed up the mountains. The Chinese built roads and created a rule that "The right side of the road is for men, the left side for women and the center for carriages."

And for the Romans the Mayor built a Roman District where there were roads where the Romans drove to the left. The Romans in the mountain town, though they drove to the left, didn't built roads like those in England, for they left the left for the pilgrims to walk down. They drove their cars somewhere between midway and the left.

The Mayor built a French District for those who came from France and the French built roads to drive their cars to the right. But the traffic police man on the street wanted the French to drive seated on the bonnet on the left side of the car and drive to their right, so the Frenchmen became accustomed to driving without a driver's seat.

The Mayor built an India District for those from Calcutta and they built laneless roads. They drove to the left or right as it pleased them, overtook or crossed each other on the left or right as it occurred to them and there was an invisible order behind all the chaos that kept the cars moving.

Many many years, so many years later, the President of America discovered that there existed an undiscovered mountain town and built a roadway to the mountain town. He announced his discovery and the mountain town became an overnight tourist attraction.

People from around the world drove along the road to the mountain town, some drove to the left and others drove to the right, along the road to the mountain town. Their cars stopped at the gateway to the mountain town, and they could go no further. The mountain town had traffic lanes, that were peculiar, very very peculiar to the visitors from all over the world.

So they drove back to where they came from.

Then the Mayor decided to build a new Gateway with an Oaken Arch. He went on air to announce that "henceforth any car will drive anywhere in mountaintown" Those who built cars that drove to the left wondered how. Those who built cars that drove to the right wondered how. They all arrived at the mountain town to find the new Gateway with the Oaken Arch.

Beneath the Oaken Arch were hundreds of multi-district drivers, clothed in oaken leaves for an uniform, who asked them where they wanted to be taken. Some said Chinese District, some said Roman District, others said French District and yet others said Indian District. The driver in the oaken uniform took up the task of driving on to himself, and drove them around, for they are made like that, made to drive anycar anywhere. The newcomers didn't have to hire four drivers to drive in four districts. Any new car destined for any District simply had to find its way to the Oaken Arch. The oaken drivers took over and handled anycar anylane anywhere.

Oaken Arch had a pool of drivers for everywhere, so everycar did not have to carry one driver for every district. Everyone lived happily ever after.

Laptop for the World's Children

Two days ago I had a glimpse of the AMD Geode processor and while looking for information stumbled upon the One Laptop Per Child (www.laptop.org) project founded by MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte and the project is all about a $100 laptop built around a AMD Geode processor with a feature list that is fascinating.

The laptop looks pretty stylish. Weighs less than 1.5 KG, convertible laptop with pivoting, reversible display; dirt- and moisture-resistant system enclosure featuring an AMD Geode LX-700@0.8W 433 Mhz, 256 MiB dynamic RAM, 1024KB SPI-interface flash ROM, 1024 MiB SLC NAND flash as mass storage, high-speed flash controller, 7.5” Dual-mode TFT display with a 1200x900 200 DPI resolution, a sealed rubber-membrane key-switch assembly keyboard, dual apacitance/resistive touchpad; supports written-input mode, AC97-compatible audio codec; stereo, with dual internal speakers; Marvell Libertas 88W8388+88W8015, 802.11b/g compatible wireless; dual adjustable, rotating coaxial antennas; supports diversity reception, 640×480 resolution, 30FPS video camera 1A max power total, 5 cell 6 V battery, sort of a temperature proof design. Looks stylish.

The software ? I copy and paste below:

Components from Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 version of the Linux operating system; we are tracking the main kernel fairly closely. We will support five programming environments on the laptop: (1) Python, from which we have built our user interface and our activity model; (2) Javascript for browser-based scripting; (3) Csound, a programmable music and audio environment; (4) Squeak, a version of Smalltalk embedded into a media-rich authoring environment; and (5) Logo. We will also provide some support Java and Flash. Applications will include a web browser built on Xulrunner, the run-time environment used by the Firefox browser; a simple document viewer based upon Evince; the AbiWord wordprocessor, an RSS reader, an email client, chat client, VOIP client; a journal a wiki with WYSIWYG editing; a multimedia authoring and playback environment; a music composition toolkit, graphics toolkits, games, a shell, and a debugger. Libraries and plugins used by OLPC include Xul, GTK+, Matchbox, Sugar, Pango, ATK, Cairo, X Window System, Avahi, and gstreamer.

Sugar appears to have a original GUI "architecture" on its own, very creative....

$100. If Dell or HP were to introduce a similar laptop, (if this project didn't exist and if a similar product developed purely on a commercial context) the package of features and software and the style, would have caused them to consider pricing the product at a price in excess of $ 1000, justifiably so, perhaps with a little more powerful processor and slightly wider display.

Inspiring.

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