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First of the OLPCs Built
eldavojohn writes "An announcement came Sunday that the first ten prototypes of the Linux-powered OLPC XO-1 had been completed in China. From the article, 'Quanta, the Chinese computer maker that won the international bidding for the project earlier this year, will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners.' Let's hope that these first prototypes do not warrant any design changes and that the testing goes well so that countries that expressed interest (Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Argentina, and Thailand) can start distributing them soon."
Those of you who were hailing Khaddafi's deep commitment to freedom when he jumped aboard will be relieved to know that he's not going anywhere anytime soon, though...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
libya has oil and is not a real poor country.
"These oil revenues and a small population give Libya one of the highest GDPs per person in Africa"
The battery can be charged with a hand crank.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Believe it or not the OLPC people are not COMPLETE FUCKING MORONS
There are lockdown measures to avoid corrupt distribution. A black market wouldn't really work because a stolen OLPC laptop won't work. Not to mention that they're pretty much useless for most other tasks. A geek may want one for the neat factor or for an effective terminal. But you can't exactly play 3d shooters on them, or store gigabytes of movies or whatever (I doubt you could even play a divx on it).
The corrupt market would be to steal the boards and then try to sell them to schools. Which is exactly what they're aiming to stop.
As for the GP, yes, it's COUNTRIES that buy them, not students.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Found this in the OLPCWiki:
Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?
The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.
The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_market
Nice to know I'd be thinking of the children rather that stealing their laptops...
DN
Just to clarify (I'm a developer working for the OLPC) that we've had developer boards for months-and-months now, using them to test the software on. These particular computers are simply more complete. But yeah, speed has been a major factor all along.
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Hear, hear.
Some figures:
Country, literacy rate in percent (world ranking)
Kazakhstan, 99.5 (29)
Ukraine, 99.4 (32)
Tonga, 98.9 (36)
Mongolia, 97.8 (47)
Argentina, 97.2 (53)
United States, 97 (55)
Thailand, 92.6 (72)
Zimbabwe, 90 (85)
Brazil, 88.4 (90)
Namibia, 85 (103)
Libya, 81.7 (111)
Source
Discussion of Source accuracy
UNDP Human Development Index Report, 2005 [pdf]
Quanta is a Taiwan company.
The point is to remove the worth.
It's a 300MHz x86 board with a gray-scale display (the colour is faked), 128M of ram, 512M of flash, no cdrom, no advanced GPU, very small keys, and the host OS is designed for small children. Perfect for reading, playing simple learning games, and browsing the web. Sucks for games, videos, music and the like.
I seriously doubt there will be a huge black market for adults to hack them and turn them into a standard Linux PC. Selling them as is to children won't be really productive either. I'm not saying people won't try. I just doubt it will be very successful.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Wrong.(Don't ya hate it when people correct you this way!)
From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_market
Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?
The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.
The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.
Yes, and not only that, but that Taiwan is NOT China is really important to its 23 million citizens. Taiwan is a democracy that has its own armies, controls its own borders, directly elects its own president, legislature... Sure, there are some reasons, unrelated to the fact that China constantly blares that it owns Taiwan and will p8wn Taiwan if Taiwan or anyone else says otherwise, but they are not good ones, and if there was ever a good guy--bad guy David vs. Goliath if you ever saw one situation, Taiwan is it. So please. Taiwan is NOT China. Quanta is a Taiwanese company that may happen to do a lot of business in China. Still, it is not the same thing and it's an important distinction to make.