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."

Comments

Re:Didn't Deliver

[Overly Critical Guy]

You'd still be able to tinker and repair the laptop, as well as write kernel changes. Darwin is open source. Despite that, this magical hypothetical idea in every Slashdotter's mind that kids are all programmers who want to write kernel code is a load of crap. They would have been better off with OS X and its fantastic frameworks, because most kids would rather use that given a choice. Linux is, frankly, a desktop disaster.

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.

XCode ships with professionally written documentation for all its APIs and technologies, much better than the web-searching you'd have to do for Linux.