Slashdot Mirror
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."
Let's assume there is one nice security hole in these laptops... Is there an automatic update system? Is it centrally controlled like Windows Update or since there are supposed to be large numbers of segregated ad-hoc networks is the distribution of these updates going to be peer based?
How do you prevent making one large botnet powered by a bunch of third-world children turning hand cranks?
Imagine all you could add for another $50! The rise in price is a terrible idea. There was a lot of symbolic significance to being the $100 laptop. Now, with that barrier broken, it will lose that cachet. If they'd simply followed through on the $100 laptop, they could have added all that and more over time.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Whenever a posting about the "$100 laptop" goes up, there is a flood of techno-elitist criticism on this board - like the CPU can't be overclocked. Who cares? The culture of these comments is elitism and xenophobia at its worst. Who cares if there is some waste / inefficiency / lack of elegance in the program. If it changes the lives of a few thousand kids, it is worth it. Take a look at programs where governments (pick your favorite, or not so favorite one) spend billions of dollars a day and have little chance of positive impact on poor kids in remote locations.
Get up out of your server log, or your WOW game and take a look at real life in remote places. If you don't like what you see in the "$100 laptop" program, stop whining and start doing something about it. They have a website. Go contact them to help.
I think the CM1 is pretty cool and I wouldn't mind having one to fool around with and I suspect I'm not the only one. What they should do is sell individual units for $200 to people in developed countries. The could put the extra $60 towads subsidizing the cost of a unit sold to developing nations so the price will remain $100 and the extra $20 could go to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program to help cover administrative costs and development of future equipment. While more advanced computers are available, often for very little money, I would buy one to give to my young niece (think baby's first computer). I suppose the OLPC could sell quite a few to developed nations for use with very young children. Having their own computer would be a source of pride and would teach responsibility and the educational possibilities are as wide open in the developed world as they are in the third world. This project is wonderful and I applaud everyone involved.
I've got a Mac, I've had it for about 18 months now and I love it. I especially love the command prompt and all the Unix utilities. That said, I agree with the decision they made. Being able to tinker and repair the laptop, as well as write kernel changes and such, is a major boon. Children will be able to learn much more about the computer if they are interested. As much as I love my Mac, it doesn't compared to Linux in a few areas. There is much more information available through some of the interfaces on Linux (/dev and such, for example) than I can find on my Mac. There is quite a bit of documentation on writing drivers and kernel changes for Linux, but next to none for OS X save Apple's documentation (which I find to be a little sparse).
Don't forget that while OS X runs well on older Macs, a custom slimmed-down Linux will run much faster and use far fewer resources. OS X is just not designed to run on 128MB of RAM by any stretch, let alone less so applications still have room to run. Frankly I think Jobs knew that OS X was incompatible with what the OLPC people were planning (mostly hardware wise, but also in ideals).
I'm not surprised that RedHat is the distro chosen (especially considering that they are a sponsor), but I don't think that's why they didn't go with OS X.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Simply put... Better Education != More Technology
The solution to education is that we elevate it to status that it deserves. Talk to many successfull people, and I'd wager that they could point to less than five (5) teachers that made a difference in their life and learning. Our Education system has these major ERRORS in it's design.
1.) Grade school is focused on churning out people who meet an arbitrary number on college entrance exams
2.) College is focused on churning out as many BS students as possible.
3.) It's too easy to get a teaching certificate
3.) ALL CLASSROOM TEACHERS ARE PAID TOO LITTLE
Solve problems 1, 2, and alter those to focus on critical thinking and you'll see a major difference in our children. Solve problem 3, 4, and we will never have to speak about teacher shortages again.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Hmmm, so give your kid access to a camera and he will become a pornstar?
sounds like someone did a bad job at parenting, like the parents of the kid in the article.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Sounds like he had it right: OUR education sustems and OUR younger generations. But as I understand it, the CM1 is targeting children in developing countries. While that's grand, I'm nevertheless a firm believer that when it comes to a child's development having access to food and water and not dying of diarrhea is more important than having access to a computer.
I just wish all the big brains at MIT and elsewhere who've put such an enormous amount of time and effort into this project had instead put it into a device or infrastructure system that could provide for the clean water and power needs of the same communities their $140 laptop is targeting. In my opinion, that would do a lot more good.
A-Bomb
I've been a hot fan of this project. But they keep changing it and delivering nothing in "real world" (i.e. actual production and selling it) and I'm getting tired of all the hype that proves wrong in the aftermath.
will have crank to power it up!
ok now it won't have crank
will look like a normal laptop!
ok now it'll look like a laptop-cross-lolipop.
it'll be $100!
ok now it won't be.
I expect this to progress in future until it ends up as a perfect clone feature/price-wise of a Dell laptop.
They should've discussed and tested all this stuff in private before thew blew the horns, again and again and again and again.
Actually, I learned quite a lot in school, compared to what I manage to learn now. I've been trying for ages to establish a regular routine of learning sessions in my free time (not ALL my free time) again. For stuff like learning languages (or, yes, becoming comfortable with computers), there's nothing like repeated small doses.
I think it's because it asserts that systems remain free of viruses through obscurity -- that is, low market share -- which is not true. The biggest counterexample to this thesis is Apache, with huge market share and far fewer security exploits.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love