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OLPC Gets a New Name, New Features

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."

2 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Didn't Deliver by jrockway · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you ever used OS X on a 400MHz machine with 256M of RAM? If not, I wouldn't recommend it.

    Also, please provide the source code for OS X.

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    My other car is first.
  2. Re:No, try again by zenhkim · · Score: 4, Informative

    > Actually, children are better served by a teacher who cares about his/her work and genuinely challanges them to actually exercise the mass of grey matter that is so devoid of thought in current times.

    Believe it or not, that's one of the important points Papert makes in his book! He decried the typical use of the classroom computer as a mere testtaking machine, or as a means to further solidify the status quo of the school lesson plan. Papert argued that, in addition to acquiring more computers and making them more available to students and teachers alike, schools need to find ways of using computers to *change the teaching process itself*.

    Sadly, Papert also pointed out that such an educational revolution would be met with resistance by none other than the education system itself. To paraphrase the book, the system must protect its own existence, and it seeks to maintain the state of that existence. It will fight any threat to either one until all avenues have been exhausted.

    After all these years, "The Children's Machine" has proven to be uncannily accurate.

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    "All hands, BRACE FOR IMPACT!"