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An anonymous reader sends this quote from OLPC News about whether the One Laptop Per Child project can expect to continue much longer: "Here is a question for you: 8 years on, would you recommend anyone start a new deployment with XO-1 laptops? With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project." A response from OLPC says their mission is "far from over." They add, "OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education."

Giulia D'Amico, Business Development VP for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) talks about the new OLPC tablets, which are now available in the U.S. through Target, Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers, with some of the $150 sales price for each tablet going to support the OLPC project in places like Uruguay, Cambodia, Rwanda, and other countries where a tablet loaded with teaching software is a way better deal than trying to supply all the books a child needs for six or eight years of school. While there are many Android tablets for sale for less than $150, Giulia points out that the OLPC tablets contain up to $300 worth of software. Plus, of course, just as with almost any other Android device, there are many thousands of apps available for it through Google Play. And let's not forget the original OLPC laptop. It has been redesigned, and renamed the OLPC XO-4 and looks much cooler than the original. You can learn more about it through olpc.tv, which has videos from the introduction of both the OPLC tablet and the XO-4 at CES 2013. OLPC has shipped close to 3 million laptops so far, and is working to port Sugar to Android so that the laptop and the tablet can use the same software. One more thing: OLPC is now focusing on software rather than hardware. When the project started at MIT, back in 2006 or so, there was no suitable hardware available. Today, many companies make low-cost tablets and keyboards for them, so there's no real need for OLPC to make its own instead of using existing hardware.

Giulia D'Amico, Business Development VP for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) talks about the new OLPC tablets, which are now available in the U.S. through Target, Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers, with some of the $150 sales price for each tablet going to support the OLPC project in places like Uruguay, Cambodia, Rwanda, and other countries where a tablet loaded with teaching software is a way better deal than trying to supply all the books a child needs for six or eight years of school. While there are many Android tablets for sale for less than $150, Giulia points out that the OLPC tablets contain up to $300 worth of software. Plus, of course, just as with almost any other Android device, there are many thousands of apps available for it through Google Play. And let's not forget the original OLPC laptop. It has been redesigned, and renamed the OLPC XO-4 and looks much cooler than the original. You can learn more about it through olpc.tv, which has videos from the introduction of both the OPLC tablet and the XO-4 at CES 2013. OLPC has shipped close to 3 million laptops so far, and is working to port Sugar to Android so that the laptop and the tablet can use the same software. One more thing: OLPC is now focusing on software rather than hardware. When the project started at MIT, back in 2006 or so, there was no suitable hardware available. Today, many companies make low-cost tablets and keyboards for them, so there's no real need for OLPC to make its own instead of using existing hardware.

Giulia D'Amico, Business Development VP for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) talks about the new OLPC tablets, which are now available in the U.S. through Target, Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers, with some of the $150 sales price for each tablet going to support the OLPC project in places like Uruguay, Cambodia, Rwanda, and other countries where a tablet loaded with teaching software is a way better deal than trying to supply all the books a child needs for six or eight years of school. While there are many Android tablets for sale for less than $150, Giulia points out that the OLPC tablets contain up to $300 worth of software. Plus, of course, just as with almost any other Android device, there are many thousands of apps available for it through Google Play. And let's not forget the original OLPC laptop. It has been redesigned, and renamed the OLPC XO-4 and looks much cooler than the original. You can learn more about it through olpc.tv, which has videos from the introduction of both the OPLC tablet and the XO-4 at CES 2013. OLPC has shipped close to 3 million laptops so far, and is working to port Sugar to Android so that the laptop and the tablet can use the same software. One more thing: OLPC is now focusing on software rather than hardware. When the project started at MIT, back in 2006 or so, there was no suitable hardware available. Today, many companies make low-cost tablets and keyboards for them, so there's no real need for OLPC to make its own instead of using existing hardware.

Giulia D'Amico, Business Development VP for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) talks about the new OLPC tablets, which are now available in the U.S. through Target, Amazon, Walmart, and other retailers, with some of the $150 sales price for each tablet going to support the OLPC project in places like Uruguay, Cambodia, Rwanda, and other countries where a tablet loaded with teaching software is a way better deal than trying to supply all the books a child needs for six or eight years of school. While there are many Android tablets for sale for less than $150, Giulia points out that the OLPC tablets contain up to $300 worth of software. Plus, of course, just as with almost any other Android device, there are many thousands of apps available for it through Google Play. And let's not forget the original OLPC laptop. It has been redesigned, and renamed the OLPC XO-4 and looks much cooler than the original. You can learn more about it through olpc.tv, which has videos from the introduction of both the OPLC tablet and the XO-4 at CES 2013. OLPC has shipped close to 3 million laptops so far, and is working to port Sugar to Android so that the laptop and the tablet can use the same software. One more thing: OLPC is now focusing on software rather than hardware. When the project started at MIT, back in 2006 or so, there was no suitable hardware available. Today, many companies make low-cost tablets and keyboards for them, so there's no real need for OLPC to make its own instead of using existing hardware.

While at CES, Timothy Lord talked with Pixel Qi Chief Operating Officer John Ryan about how the company, which was originally founded to make screens for the One Laptop Per Child project, is now moving into the commercial market for laptop and tablet screens. Pixel Qi screens are not only inexpensive to make, but are easier to read in sunlight than standard LCDs -- and use less power, too. What they're doing now, says Timothy in the video, is "pretty cool," so check it out.

sl4shd0rk writes "Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project are still going and have a new plan in the works: a laptop air-drop to help facilitate 'self-education' in areas with large poor populations. 'In the first year we'll go in and meet with tribal elders and aid organizations, people not involved with education, but then we let the kids learn,' Negroponte said. All of this work by Negroponte and others was essential, he explained, because market forces were leaving the poor of the world behind. Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world."

An anonymous reader writes "The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, decided to celebrate the 500,000th One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in that country in style, announcing orders for half a million more and 20,000 additional Lego education WeDo robot kits for public schools, bringing the total number of kits for distribution up to 92,000. The latest OLPC laptop, the XO-1.75, has the lowest power draw ever thanks to a Marvell Armada 600 ARM processor and runs Fedora GNU/Linux with dual desktops Sugar (in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua) and GNOME. For the first time, the XOs will be manufactured locally; the previous 2 million, including the blue high school variant with grownup keyboard, were all made by Quanta Computer. Meanwhile, parallel development continues on the upcoming XO-3 tablet; OLPC's New Technologies director is exploring software paths including GTK3 for Sugar, Android and Chrome. I, for one, salute our new plastic Peruvian overlords."

An anonymous reader writes "The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, decided to celebrate the 500,000th One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in that country in style, announcing orders for half a million more and 20,000 additional Lego education WeDo robot kits for public schools, bringing the total number of kits for distribution up to 92,000. The latest OLPC laptop, the XO-1.75, has the lowest power draw ever thanks to a Marvell Armada 600 ARM processor and runs Fedora GNU/Linux with dual desktops Sugar (in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua) and GNOME. For the first time, the XOs will be manufactured locally; the previous 2 million, including the blue high school variant with grownup keyboard, were all made by Quanta Computer. Meanwhile, parallel development continues on the upcoming XO-3 tablet; OLPC's New Technologies director is exploring software paths including GTK3 for Sugar, Android and Chrome. I, for one, salute our new plastic Peruvian overlords."

Not many days ago, we mentioned ZDNet's interview with Nicholas Negroponte, in which Negroponte had some harsh things to say about Sugar and its connection to the slower-than-hoped uptake of the XO. Ivan Krstic (formerly head of the OLPC's security innovative subsystem) responded to Negroponte's claims, which he says are "nonsense." Among other things, he mentions that Sugar "was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux."

One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"

Chris Wilson writes "According to the Financial Times, Google has announced their support for a new initiative called O3B to 'bring internet access to 3bn people in Africa and other emerging markets by launching at least 16 satellites to bring its services to the unconnected' by 2010. Coverage is available from Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal as well. 'The $750m project to connect mobile masts in a swath of countries within 45 degrees of the equator to fast broadband networks ... could bring the cost of bandwidth in such markets down by 95 per cent.' This will probably be the largest single investment in network infrastructure for developing countries in history. Google clearly wishes to use this project to enable broadband Internet access in developing regions, but many other things must be in place before that can happen, including fixed power infrastructure, PCs or OLPCs, technical support and skills, and useful content and services for areas with lower literacy."

Brian Jordan writes "For 48 hours during the weekend of August 29-31 at the OLPC Physics Game Jam Boston, game developers will compete in teams of 2-4 to design and implement a physics-based game for the One Laptop per Child XO laptop. There are prize categories for indie, professional, and remote developers (Ludum Dare style). In addition to OLPC/Jam-related swag for all participants, one team will win an XO laptop. Participants should have some game development experience, but we'll be going over the development process during the event — read below for details. If you'll be in the Boston area this weekend, or want to participate remotely, sign up before August 22. If you're a graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area, or want to be a volunteer, get in touch." Click the magic link for details of the crash course in game programming being offered.

Eric Jordan of the Box2D project will be giving a talk on developing physics games with pyBox2D for the OLPC XO. Nirav Patel, the Google Summer of Code student working on vision processing for the XO, will describe combining physics and vision processing for interactive games. And Alex Levenson, OLPC summer intern and creator of the x2o physics game, will give a remote introduction to level design for his game.

Brian Jordan writes "For 48 hours during the weekend of August 29-31 at the OLPC Physics Game Jam Boston, game developers will compete in teams of 2-4 to design and implement a physics-based game for the One Laptop per Child XO laptop. There are prize categories for indie, professional, and remote developers (Ludum Dare style). In addition to OLPC/Jam-related swag for all participants, one team will win an XO laptop. Participants should have some game development experience, but we'll be going over the development process during the event — read below for details. If you'll be in the Boston area this weekend, or want to participate remotely, sign up before August 22. If you're a graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area, or want to be a volunteer, get in touch." Click the magic link for details of the crash course in game programming being offered.

Eric Jordan of the Box2D project will be giving a talk on developing physics games with pyBox2D for the OLPC XO. Nirav Patel, the Google Summer of Code student working on vision processing for the XO, will describe combining physics and vision processing for interactive games. And Alex Levenson, OLPC summer intern and creator of the x2o physics game, will give a remote introduction to level design for his game.

Brian Jordan writes "For 48 hours during the weekend of August 29-31 at the OLPC Physics Game Jam Boston, game developers will compete in teams of 2-4 to design and implement a physics-based game for the One Laptop per Child XO laptop. There are prize categories for indie, professional, and remote developers (Ludum Dare style). In addition to OLPC/Jam-related swag for all participants, one team will win an XO laptop. Participants should have some game development experience, but we'll be going over the development process during the event — read below for details. If you'll be in the Boston area this weekend, or want to participate remotely, sign up before August 22. If you're a graphic artist, sound designer, musician in the Boston area, or want to be a volunteer, get in touch." Click the magic link for details of the crash course in game programming being offered.

Eric Jordan of the Box2D project will be giving a talk on developing physics games with pyBox2D for the OLPC XO. Nirav Patel, the Google Summer of Code student working on vision processing for the XO, will describe combining physics and vision processing for interactive games. And Alex Levenson, OLPC summer intern and creator of the x2o physics game, will give a remote introduction to level design for his game.

Brian Jordan and other readers sent in word that Google has taken the wraps off Knol, its expert-written challenger to Wikipedia. (We discussed Knol when it was announced last year.) Wired has an in-depth look. Knol's distinctions from Wikipedia are that authors are identified by their real names (and verified), and that they can share in ad revenue if they choose to. The service initially features a lot of medical articles, which is interesting considering that Medipedia also launched today. This medical wiki is backed by Harvard's and Stanford's medical schools.

otakuj462 writes "Many participants in OLPC's 'Give 1 Get 1' program of last November are now encountering what has come to be known as the 'stuck key' problem, in which one or more of the keys on their XO-1 laptop's built-in keyboard become stuck in an activated position, or are activated when adjacent keys are pressed. As of January 30th, the official word from OLPC is that the root cause of this problem is unknown because '[t]here are several manufacturers of the keyboards.' ('So far we don't know of any _reliable_ method of fixing the keyboard or the exact root cause.') It is unknown just how widespread this problem currently is, as the 30-day manufacturer's warranty has already expired for most G1G1 participants. However, the OLPC forums are full of reports. OLPC is currently deploying the XO-1 to children in Mongolia and Peru, as well as other developing nations. If OLPC is actively deploying units with known, critical hardware bugs, without a dedicated support infrastructure in place, to children who have never seen a computer before, should they still be considered to be a responsible organization? Did OLPC deploy their hardware too soon?"

otakuj462 writes "Many participants in OLPC's 'Give 1 Get 1' program of last November are now encountering what has come to be known as the 'stuck key' problem, in which one or more of the keys on their XO-1 laptop's built-in keyboard become stuck in an activated position, or are activated when adjacent keys are pressed. As of January 30th, the official word from OLPC is that the root cause of this problem is unknown because '[t]here are several manufacturers of the keyboards.' ('So far we don't know of any _reliable_ method of fixing the keyboard or the exact root cause.') It is unknown just how widespread this problem currently is, as the 30-day manufacturer's warranty has already expired for most G1G1 participants. However, the OLPC forums are full of reports. OLPC is currently deploying the XO-1 to children in Mongolia and Peru, as well as other developing nations. If OLPC is actively deploying units with known, critical hardware bugs, without a dedicated support infrastructure in place, to children who have never seen a computer before, should they still be considered to be a responsible organization? Did OLPC deploy their hardware too soon?"

otakuj462 writes "Many participants in OLPC's 'Give 1 Get 1' program of last November are now encountering what has come to be known as the 'stuck key' problem, in which one or more of the keys on their XO-1 laptop's built-in keyboard become stuck in an activated position, or are activated when adjacent keys are pressed. As of January 30th, the official word from OLPC is that the root cause of this problem is unknown because '[t]here are several manufacturers of the keyboards.' ('So far we don't know of any _reliable_ method of fixing the keyboard or the exact root cause.') It is unknown just how widespread this problem currently is, as the 30-day manufacturer's warranty has already expired for most G1G1 participants. However, the OLPC forums are full of reports. OLPC is currently deploying the XO-1 to children in Mongolia and Peru, as well as other developing nations. If OLPC is actively deploying units with known, critical hardware bugs, without a dedicated support infrastructure in place, to children who have never seen a computer before, should they still be considered to be a responsible organization? Did OLPC deploy their hardware too soon?"

otakuj462 writes "Many participants in OLPC's 'Give 1 Get 1' program of last November are now encountering what has come to be known as the 'stuck key' problem, in which one or more of the keys on their XO-1 laptop's built-in keyboard become stuck in an activated position, or are activated when adjacent keys are pressed. As of January 30th, the official word from OLPC is that the root cause of this problem is unknown because '[t]here are several manufacturers of the keyboards.' ('So far we don't know of any _reliable_ method of fixing the keyboard or the exact root cause.') It is unknown just how widespread this problem currently is, as the 30-day manufacturer's warranty has already expired for most G1G1 participants. However, the OLPC forums are full of reports. OLPC is currently deploying the XO-1 to children in Mongolia and Peru, as well as other developing nations. If OLPC is actively deploying units with known, critical hardware bugs, without a dedicated support infrastructure in place, to children who have never seen a computer before, should they still be considered to be a responsible organization? Did OLPC deploy their hardware too soon?"

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton adds his experience to the litany of woes with Microsoft Vista. Unlike most commentators who have a beef with the operating system, Bennett does a bit of surveying to bolster his points. Read his account by clicking on the magic link.

My brand-new-out-of-the-box Windows Vista machine could not access www.facebook.com. A nearby XP machine could, but the Vista machine couldn't. I went back to Circuit City to try out the other Vista demo machines, and they could access other sites but not Facebook, either. And that honeymoon feeling that you get when you buy a new computer and expect it to solve all your problems, was over for me. Having built my latest career on helping people access Facebook where they were blocked from it, by some cosmic joke was Vista now blocking me from getting to Facebook on my own machine?

I know, another article bashing Vista, what could be more banal. (Kids! That word, meaning "trite" or "unoriginal", is pronounced "ba-NAHL". If you say it the wrong way like I did in an interview, it sounds naughty and you sound stupid.) But in my own random survey of 30 Vista users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a handy way to check these things), three quarters (23) said the only reason they were using Vista was that the PC store they went to didn't sell XP machines any more, and about half of all respondents (14) said that they would go back to Windows XP if they could. So I don't want to get a bunch of e-mails with Ron Paul links in the signature saying "Nobody has to use Vista if they don't want to!" (I'm aware that a survey of 30 people is too small to be scientific, but it's enough to get a ballpark figure for about $5 on Mechanical Turk.) Besides, the more people write testimonials to what they found frustrating about Vista, the more likely it is that some future version will keep what is good about the new OS, while providing a less frustrating interface (suggested name: "Vista 98").

It turns out the Facebook issue was not really Microsoft's fault -- www.facebook.com had a broken IPv6 record, and Vista defaults to using IPv6 where XP used IPv4, so that's why the host wasn't working. (In case you run into this with any other Web sites on Vista, I fixed the problem by disabling IPv6 in network settings and rebooting.) But it was one more example of something that used to work pre-Vista and then stopped working, and every case like that adds up to the overall frustration of switching to a new system, regardless of whose fault it is.

I hasten to add that I am not some partisan Microsoft basher. I like XP just fine, never more than when I went back to it after a few days on Vista, and I still think for that matter that Vista would be easier to switch to than Linux. Having been involved for years with free speech activism, I run into a lot of people in the same circles who are strong Linux advocates, apparently because the concept of "freedom of speech" is closely aligned with "making every file search as simple and stress-free as a Hamas hostage negotiation". So every year or two I'll try out the latest version of some Linux distro to see how long it would take to get used to it. In 2005, full of optimism, I cheerfully booted up the latest version of Shrike, then tried to find a directory and discovered I could not right-click on the hard drive root dir and specify the name of a directory I wanted to search for (that only worked for files, not directories). I posted a query to a Linux newsgroup, and a respondent told me that the solution was to open a command prompt and type "man find", which I am aware is a polite way of saying "screw you, newbie", but which I dutifully followed anyway and got an output screen of which the first paragraph was:

find searches the directory tree rooted at each given file name by evaluating the given expression from left to right, according to the rules of precedence (see section OPERATORS), until the outcome is known (the left hand side is false for and operations, true for or), at which point find moves on to the next file name.

and that was all my Linux for that year. Maybe I'm overdue to try it again. (Microsoft gives away their Virtual PC program that makes it easy to try other operating systems; I think it's a ploy to make us appreciate Windows more.) Now, I love the concept of a freely-distributable, freely-modifiable operating system, and I've recommended Linux to people when you need it to do something cool that Windows can't do, like bypassing Windows security by booting a PC from a CD. And it's done a lot of good for organizations like the One Laptop Per Child program, which can keep their costs down by using a free operating system. But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to? If I was nervous about Vista because some of the interface had changed and some of my old programs no longer worked, it wasn't helpful to tell me to switch to a system where all of the interface would change and none of my old programs would work.

So, I wanted to like Vista. I knew that eventually everyone would have to upgrade anyway, so, not wanting to be left behind, I wanted to switch to Vista because of the same factor that spammers use to get your attention: "Other guys are improving themselves, why aren't you?" But there were some things I ran into almost immediately:

• Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer no longer have the "File / Edit / View" menu bars across the top of the window. Was this a big problem under XP? When the menus gave quick, two-click access to most actions that you could take within the application, was there a grassroots movement to have them removed? I did eventually find that you can hit the "Alt" key to bring the menus back, but why put people through that frustration? The most annoying feeling while using a computer is being yanked out of thinking about what you're doing with the computer to having to concentrate on how to use it.

  Perhaps the idea was to steer users towards using the buttons on the toolbar, but there aren't enough buttons to cover all the options located under the menus. If the UI designers wanted to steer users gently towards using the buttons, my suggestion would have been: Whenever the user picks something under a menu that corresponds to something accessible from the toolbar, display a dialog box which says for example, "In the future, you can print faster by clicking the printer button on the toolbar", along with a picture (and a "Do not show this message again" checkbox -- important!).

• Windows Explorer also did away with the "Up" button that lets you browse from the current directory to the higher-level directory. Again, probably not in response to a groundswell of users demanding for that button to be removed, when it took up about one square centimeter of screen space. Supposedly Windows Explorer makes up for this by displaying the entire path to the current directory in the address bar, so that if the path is "C:\Financial Records\Chris Pirillo\ Pectoral Real Estate\", you can click on "Chris Pirillo" to go one directory higher. The trouble is that I frequently give my directories extremely long and descriptive names like (this is a real example) "Flash-Player-8.5.0.246-beta2.downloaded-2006-03-20-from-labs.macromedia.com" so that I can keep track of where and when I got each piece of downloaded software, in case I ever need to go back to a previous version that the software maker no longer makes available because they're trying to steer me away from it (ironically, "Vista syndrome"). With a directory that has a long name like that, the higher-level directories aren't visible in the address bar, so I had to locate it manually in the left-hand tree view panel. OK, knock off the violins, the point is that I didn't have to do that in XP.
• I have an older monitor, so I wanted to turn ClearType off. The IE7 help file describes how to do this in IE, but that didn't work for me no matter how many times I tried, and my eyes were aching by the time I found out that in Vista it's a default system-wide setting that overrides IE's setting until you change the system-wide one. I would have suggested putting one line in the IE7 help file: "Note: if your operating system such as Windows Vista is set to use ClearType system-wide, you must disable this as well to disable ClearType in IE."
• Virtual PC, which worked on all versions of Windows XP, is not supported on Vista Home Premium. I need Virtual PC (for reasons other than Linux-bashing), so this was a deal-breaker.
• Telnet no longer installed by default. Even though I use a different telnet program for regular use, telnet.exe was handy to test whether a remote machine was reachable on a given port. (For example, in a command prompt, type "telnet www.yahoo.com 80" and when the command prompt screen goes blank, that means the machine www.yahoo.com is accepting responses on port 80, the standard port for Web traffic. Try connecting to port 81 instead, and you get no response on that port. This can be useful when diagnosing problems with Web servers and other programs.) Even though it's not hard to get telnet back, why would they go to the trouble of removing it?
• The aforementioned Facebook problem. This seemed so startling at the time that I almost stopped everything to write an article just about that, musing on Microsoft having so much power that all PC stores were now exclusively stocking computers running an OS that, at the time anyway, couldn't access Facebook. But then I asked another bunch of users on Mechanical Turk, and all respondents using Vista said they could access Facebook after all. Of course, this wasn't a random sample, since users who bought Vista and couldn't access Facebook, probably would have returned their machines a long time ago, but I'm still not sure what caused it to work on some machines and not others -- all I know is that Facebook was inaccessible until I disabled IPv6.
  
  I know Facebook is reading these articles, since in November I wrote about how you could circumvent Facebook's system of verifying that users were real high school students, by doing the following: "(1) create a profile of a non-overweight girl and sign up as a member of a high school network, pending confirmation; (2) search for several boys in that network and send them friend requests; and (3) wait for at least one of them to confirm you back". Shortly afterwards, Facebook changed the verification system, so that now, if you're confirming someone who is a pending member of a high school network but no one else has confirmed them yet, Facebook warns you, "Only check this box if you're absolutely sure that you know this person." So, whichever of Mark Zuckerberg's friends is reading my articles: Clever idea, and, keep the IPv6 records working.

That was as far as I got before I stopped trying to get used to Vista and started taking notes for this article (working title: "Vist Vucked"). From the Mechanical Turk users who responded to my survey, the other most common reported problems were: software compatibility, hardware compatibility, difficulty with the UI, and running too slowly. Presumably the first two problems will improve over time, but the UI will always be hard to switch to as long as users can't find functions that were easy locatable in the old interface, and if it runs slower than XP, that will always be a factor no matter how fast your computer is. (However fast it runs Vista, you'd always be able to make it run even faster with XP instead!)

The best things I've heard about Vista have been that (a) it is the most secure Windows ever (which Dave Barry says is like calling asparagus the "most articulate vegetable ever"), and (b) it features better multimedia integration. To which my responses were: (a) the number of incomprehensible warnings that Vista flashes at a user whenever they look at the computer funny, does not make it more secure, because users will condition themselves to just ignore those warnings, and (b) I hate watching TV on my computer anyway.

Since TV/PC integration is a major selling point for Vista, I thought this last issue was worth looking harder at: Do people really want to use their computers to watch TV? My computer monitor is in an office where I sit up close when I'm working; but TV feels more comfortable to watch from several feet away, and in my office I can't even scoot my chair back that far. (And if I lived with family, I doubt they'd want to crowd into my office to watch a movie.) In fact, I like the psychological separation of the TV set in the living room from the distractions of the computer in the office: I go in there when I'm done with everything in here. The only way I'd regularly download and watch movies would be if I had a way to send them wirelessly to my TV, but a wireless PC-to-TV converter and the corresponding receiver together cost about $200.

Seeking more validation of my opinions from strangers, I did another survey of 30 Mechanical Turk users, asking if they would rather drive to a movie rental store or download a movie online for the same price. Almost half (14) said they'd rather drive to the movie store, citing the comfort of watching the movie on their TV as opposed to on the computer. Another fourth of the respondents (8) said they'd download the movie but only if they could send the content to their TV to watch, and only the last fourth (8) said they'd actually watch it on their computer monitor. So the future of convergence between PC and TV will probably be not in all-in-one systems but in devices that link the PC in your study with the TV in your living room, and since there's no household name yet for PC-to-TV linkage, the field is wide open for some lucky company to make a product that becomes synonymous with the concept, the way "TiVo" is easier to say than "Digital Video Recorder". Maybe that will be a boost for systems like Vista. If that happens at about the same time that a Vista successor is released that makes the interface easier to switch to from XP, I'll bet that will be the tipping point that gets people switching voluntarily. (Of course many people will switch by then just because they need a new computer and they couldn't find one with anything but Vista on it.)

Anyway, I was only trying a new Vista machine because the hard drive on my old computer died, but after all the data had been recovered, I just installed a new drive in the old machine and went back to XP, while my Vista machine was returned to its perch, gargoyle-like, on the shelves at Circuit City, waiting to pounce on the next unsuspecting wretch with dreams of self-improvement through newer computer purchases. The only remnant of Vista that I have left is IE7, which was installed by my Windows XP restore disk and can't be removed, and which is incompatible with some sites and programs that I need, so I've been using Firefox more and getting to like it. That's lucky, since I've already offended the loyal software-logo-wearing constituencies of Vista and Linux, and wouldn't want to deal with the Firefox crowd too. As my friend Anne Mitchell says, "Admitting you hate Firefox is almost as bad as admitting to being Republican." (Except that when Firefox screws with a page, the chat logs don't end up on national television. Ba-dump-bump!)

SimHacker writes "Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "Micropolis", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create 'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."

SimHacker writes "Electronic Arts has donated the original 'classic' version of Will Wright's popular SimCity game to the One Laptop Per Child project. SimCity is the epitome of constructionist educational games, and has been widely used by educators to unlock and speed-up the transformational skills associated with creative thinking. It's also been used in the Future City Competition by seventh- and eighth-grade students to foster engineering skills and inspire students to explore futuristic concepts and careers in engineering. OLPC SimCity is based on the X11 TCL/Tk version of SimCity for Unix developed and adapted to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, and the GPL open source code will soon be released under the name "Micropolis", which was SimCity's original working title. SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, called on game developers to create 'frameworks and scripting environments — tools with which children themselves could create their own content.' The long term agenda of the OLPC SimCity project is to convert SimCity into a scriptable Python module, integrate it with the OLPC's Sugar user interface and Cairo rendering library. Eventually they hope to apply Seymour Papert's and Alan Kay's ideas about constructionist education and teaching kids to program."

An anonymous reader writes "In a move going largely unnoticed by developers, the OLPC project now requires all submissions to be hosted in the RedHat Fedora project. While this may not seem like a big deal, the implications are interesting. First, contributors have to sign the Fedora Project Individual Contributor License Agreement. By being forced to submit contributions to the Fedora repository they automatically fall under the provisions of US export law. So, no OLPC for Cuba, Syria and the like. Ever."

lisah writes "While the One Laptop Per Child project pulled itself together and shipped its first Beta machines, Intel was busy developing its own version, the Classmate PC. Inevitable comparisons will be made between the two (especially since OLPC's chairman Nicholas Negroponte called Intel's move "predatory"), so Linux.com's Tina Gasperson and her kids took a Classmate PC for a test run to see how it does in the real world. The upshot? Good battery life, easy to use, and great with ketchup. 'The Classmate is so adorably cozy it make you want to snuggle up on a comfy couch or lean back on some pillows on the floor while you surf. Good thing wireless is built right in. Too bad the typical Linux foibles apply. The first snag was having to log in as root to check the system configuration because the Classmate wouldn't log on to the network. Something tells me most elementary and high school teachers with nothing but Windows experience aren't going to get that.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

prostoalex writes "The $100 laptop introduced by Nicholas Negroponte as part of the One Laptop Per Child program will end up costing $175, Associated Press says. The demand for the program is apparent as 'seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white "XO" computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash.'"

juwiley writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has released information about its advanced security platform called Bitfrost. Could children with a $100 laptop end up with a better security infrastructure than executives using $5000 laptops powered by Vista? 'What's deeply troubling — almost unbelievable — about [Unix style permissions] is that they've remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today...In 1971, this might have been acceptable...We have set out to create a system that is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market.'"

Zoxed writes "The BBC is reporting that the OLPC will be available to the public early next year on a buy-2-get-1 basis through eBay. With its cheap price, fully open spec. and full/open hardware support for Linux, expandability, 2W rating and LinuxBIOS booting it sounds like an embedded-Linux hackers favorite new toy."

An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent — the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Opera developers have ported their browser to the $100 laptop. Håkon Wium Lie writes: 'Seeing Opera run on the OLPC for first time was a revelation — no browser has ever been more beautiful. The resolution of the screen is stunning (200dpi) and Opera makes the most of the embedded DejaVu fonts.' Claudio Santambrogio writes: 'Opera runs beautifully on it. The machine is not really the fastest, but Opera's performance is excellent — the browsing experience is beautifully smooth: all sites load fine and quickly, and even complex DHTML pages with heavy animations do not suffer.'"

feranick writes "There have been a lot of articles on Slashdot about the OLPC project, most of them regarding the hardware, the social impact or the cost of the operation itself. However the software development, specifically in the GUI didn't get so far much attention. This blog summarizes some of the OLPC global interface guidelines. You will see that what is really new in the laptop is not the laptop itself, but the completely new idea behind the design, where instead of applications you have activities, documents are now journals, 'application bundles can be signed by whoever works on them — because there is a view source key on the keyboard, anybody can modify an app and distribute it'. It really looks like if this is successfully, we could see a new breakthrough in GUI design also in mainstream PCs: "This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is — boring and unoriginal.""

Rockgod noted that "The LinuxBIOS project aims to take down the last barrier in Open Source systems by providing a free firmware (BIOS) implementation. LinuxBIOS celebrates its Sixth anniversary this year, and has an installed base of over 1 million LinuxBIOS systems. With the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, that number is expected to exceed 10 million users in 2007. LinuxBIOS supports 65 mainboards from 31 vendors in v1 and another 56 mainboards from 27 vendors in v2"

paulmac84 writes "Popular Science has released their Best of What's New 2006 awards. In the computing section the One Laptop Per Child project took home the Grand Prize. From the article: 'The goal of the XO is simple and noble: to give every child a laptop, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 apiece. But the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit, formed at MIT, didn't just create a cheap computer. In addition to cutting costs — by designing lower-priced circuitry and using an open-source operating system, among other things — it also improved on the standard laptop by slashing the machine's energy use by 90 percent, ideal for a device that could be charged by hand-cranked power in rural villages.' The Innovation of The Year Award went to 'the alpha nail that makes your home twice as tough'. Sometimes the simple ideas really are the best."

pickyouupatnine writes "According to a story on Ars Technica, the $100 MIT Laptop is now going to cost $140. It has a new name — it'll now be called the Children's Machine 1 (CM1). The added price comes with new features! The laptop will now come with a 400 MHz AMD processor, 512 Megs of Flash storage, an SD card slot, mic and headphone jacks, a built in camera, built-in wireless, and an 8-inch LCD at a 1280x900 resolution." From the article: "Tremendous progress has been made this summer on the Sugar user interface system that will be shipped with the CM1. Funded by Google through the Summer of Code (SoC) initiative, intrepid college student Erik Pukinskis has collaborated with the GNOME development community to adapt AbiWord for use with the portable Linux system. Although still experimental, AbiWord has successfully been integrated into the Sugar environment. Artists and developers continue to work on the evolving Sugar interface, and the fruits of their labor can be seen in demoes, mockups, and design reviews."

ex-geek writes "Seems like Negroponte's One Laptop per Child program has been rejected by the Ministry of Human Resource Development of India. Among the objections are concerns about the effect of extensive laptop use on children's health. Better uses for the monies, which would be required to roll out the OLPC project, are also named. Most insightful however is the observation that not one industrial country has so far implemented a similar program for its children, which casts doubt as to what the pedagogical use for notebooks in class really is."

capt turnpike writes "The One Laptop per Child association and its chairman, MIT Media Labs's Nicholas Negroponte, unvelied a working model of their $100 laptop at the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) show, and the little laptop that might was a hit. It's got a version of Fedora Linux, is rugged, and each unit will work as part of a wireless mesh automatically. From the article: "However, as Negroponte put it in his address, One Laptop per Child isn't all about the laptops. The main goal is to tap into the ability of every child to toss away a manual and figure out how to make gadgets work on their own, thus helping children help themselves to learn." eWEEK.com also has photos."