Following is an email I recently sent to the MIT group(
laptop@media.mit.edu) that's building a $100 linux based laptop as a
possible replacement for textbooks and teachers in developing countries:
(They rejected my proposal by stating that building a laptop is their
only interest. It seemed that the
LCD screen is their main technology. My technology is
ROBACUS NETWORK for open computing.)
Dear Sirs:
Besides your current $100 laptop, could you also consider building a
linux box that displays on TV and
connects to the Internet via phone line, to bring the prize tag
down to approaching $10? This is because most families and
villages in the
third-world countries could barely affort a TV, and the governments
could barely bring them phone services.
Such a box would just be a keyboard, but representing a node in an open
computing network. Open computing is open software plus open
hardware. Being open means not only free access but also
everything ownerless. It would be a communal computing
environment for collective development, application and accumulation of
knowledge and experiences in the forms of readily usable
software.
The complementary software to your linux-driven hardware is an
automated software computing environemnt, ROBACUS, or robotic
abacus. ROBACUS uses natural language for programming and
software robots for knowledge transfer and accumulation. A user
only needs to be familiarized with less than 1000 English words to
become
proficient in using ROBACUS. This could be the first viable step
mankind takes toward a long-awaited universal language.
The main technology of ROBACUS consists of natural-language programming
language and software robot. The natural language programming involves
the computer guiding the human in a top-down formulation of the
problem. In the past, it's the flipping from top-down to
bottom-up
formulation
that has prevented us from solving physical problems of
any significance, except for the great minds, who nevertheless could
only
solve pitifully few problems
at that. Now we could just about solve any problem by leaving
the thinking to the computer.
The software robots are verbatim recordings of
conversational or menu-driven interaction between users and
computers. Once recorded they can be played back in a way exactly
like robots reperforming the same tasks, but in a user-controllable
mode, allowing adding to and modifying the task. Now information
exchange is seamless and reliable, since the human factor
is largely bypassed. A wide world web of software robots would
serve as a repository of how-to's, a far cry from today's
gluts of useless what's. And the education value of
software robots
is immeasurable. Anyone can become an instant expert in a field
by just letting the robot lead him through a tutorial tour.
Two other pioneering features of ROBACUS are a robotic editor and
a built-in self-debugger. The robotic editor, unlike the standard
editors, vi and
emacs, uses intuitive keys and eliminate all the unnecessay strokes in
an editting
session. Being robotic, no job is too big for this small, but
dynamically expandable, editor.
The debugger starts off as a diagnoser of
the problem and ends up as a bug fixer, all performed transparent to
the
user. This is made possible with the automatic activation of
pertinent software robots and robotic editor. By the time the PC
reaches 10 gig-hertz, the computer may start to appear self-healing and
spontaneously expanding.
ROBACUS has been maintained by me as a free, licenseless and ownerless
software package. It is
currently operational on a Redhat Linux 7.3. First
developed for nuclear analyses, ROBACUS has been used in applications
ranging from the design of space
nuclear reactors to the analysis of a ping-pong match. ROBACUS is
intended to make computing
accessible to all.
Now the software cost has been zeroed
out. How far can you guys push on the hardware end?