[Csped] Power2People Goals (and a question)

[John Howland]

On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Joey wrote:

> Ill start with the question.  Are we looking for a portable system?
> Clearly there are pros and cons to a portable machine.

All of the choices/criteria are yours to determine.  Portability adds
(probably) to overall cost and complexity.  However, portability could
be defined to be easily movable, but not operable when not connected to
some sort of power grid.  For example, suppose the target user was a
school setting where, for security reasons, the machines had to be
moved to a secure locker, but when they were in use they could be connected
to a power source.

>
> Things our system should be capable of:
>
> 1.  Connecting to a network for weather information, email, web browsing
> and so on.
> 2.  Word processing

Spreadsheet?

> 3. Multi-user capability, with extremely limited access to normal user
> accounts (the less access the average user has, the less maintenance the
> system is likely to need).
> 4. Very basic and easy interface... much of what is available in open
> source operating systems will be completely useless to the average user
> of these systems.

Gnome seems to be most linux distro's choice, but there are lots of lighter
weight gui's.  See Ubuntu for example.

> 5. Update capability, likely over a local connection, possibly to a
> central, more powerful machine.
> 6. Some sort of method to completely reset the system to its original
> configuration, in case of extreme malfunction. Obviously the easier the
> better
> 7. Install that can be easily changed for locality.  Language, special
> applications and so on.
>
> I don't have much to say about hardware, it might be best to figure out
> what we want to be able to do and then build our system around that.  It

User requirements! Radical!  UML might even be useful here to get a handle
users.

> would be a shame to build a system, only to realize later it is
> completely useless for our goals.
>
> Doesn't matter to me what I end up doing, Im more than willing to take
> any job nobody else wants to do, although there are enough interesting
> topics that I don't see that being a huge problem...
>
> I hope to see more of these by tomorrow!  See you all in Software
> Engineering HAHAHA (Im sure we will have loads of fun :))
>
> Joey
>
>
>
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_______________________________________________________________
John E. Howland       url: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/
Computer Science    email: jhowland at ariel.cs.trinity.edu
Trinity University  voice: (210) 999-7364
One Trinity Place     fax: (210) 999-7477
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