Slashdot Mirror
First Look At Final OLPC Design
blackbearnh writes "At the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, AMD hosted a presentation of the final Industrial Prototype (Beta 1) of the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop. Linux Today has extensive reporting, including new photos and details about power consumption, networking, and the logistics of distributing and servicing what will be the largest rollout of any computing platform in history: 5 million units in the first year. This will represent nearly a 10% increase in the total worldwide laptop production for 2007."
I have to admit that the more I read about the OLPC the more it seems like an ideal device for couch-centric web surfing and ebook reading... ;)
But respect to the project for getting this far, I for one hope they make it all the way. Information wants to be free, after all.
.: Max Romantschuk
I saw the pics (which are quite nice!) and the first this that jumped into my mind was the ages old (by hardware standards) but infinitely cool eMate 300 based on Apple's Newton platform. Those things were nigh indestructible and were marketed at he education market. All of those schools that are looking to invest thousands of dollars for computer equipment should really turn an eye to this unit -- cheap, infinitely flexible, and incorporating a lot of things that could be educational...
They will be children using these devices, you prick.
MS has had prototypes to try and install XP on, does anyone think they were successful? It looks like an amazing amount of thought has gone into the design and execution. MS must be scared to death of this thing.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
OLPC because every child has a right to have MySpace account!!
Eclipse PDE and Me
Well, so much for the C64 world domination. It was fun while it lasted.
... Wait! With this production rate, it's more than three years to go, isn't it? Hmm, I guess I can snog my little lovely breadbox for some more time.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'd pay $300 for a rugged laptop that runs 6 hours, can be stuffed into a small bag, has wifi, browser and other functionality. I'm sure a lot of other people would too - who knows perhaps it would be great way to subsidize the educational version.
Via Ebay ? ! ?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6246989.stm
Get the EULA T-shirt
Just wondering... What happens when somebody forgets the thing on direct sunlight (which is IMHO quite likely with kids)? Won't it damage the LCD or battery if left there for a while?
R Tape loading error, 0:1
There is one aspect of the OLPC that really worries me: the software. The machine will ship with many pieces of entirely new software, or at least new frontends for existing programs (e.g. Firefox). I think that this is a significant risk. There is a lot of code to be designed, written, and thoroughly tested before their first deployment on millions of machines. Those machines may not see a network connection after they are sold, so the software has to be right first time. It also has to be secure.
However, the OLPC folks seem unworried:
With two more betas to go before the summer, Bletsas was unfazed by the glitches. He also called the current state of the software "barely useable," but again was confident that it would be where it needed to be by launch.
I hope that this confidence is not misplaced.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
The four buttons just below the screen and to the right are marked Triangle, Circle, Square, X.
What's the story there? Did Sony suggest it? Were Sony asked for it? Is it product placement, or did the OX designers see merit in the culture-agnostic use of geometric shapes?
OLPC should get to know their customers a little. This quote is a gem:
"You have to look at this through the needs of a child [in the developing world]. A child doesn't want to play the latest video games. he wants to be able to read a book."
Yes, those pure, innocent children of poor nations, unafflicted by the ills of our modern society, only want to study and advance themselves. Just look at the preferences of most children in the society with which you are familiar. And the children in poor communities -- they are even more focused on knowledge and self-improvement!
It sounds like these MIT engineers are using themselves as a focus group -- if they were children in a poor country, knowing what they know now, that's exactly what they'd want!
...when you asked me what irony was? Ironically they might have to resort to third-world cheap labor as the final solution to pumping the cost down to $100. Good thing little Paco* is learning how to use a laptop, since the only decent job in his country is putting them together! *Random spanish name chosen because Brazil was one of the first countries on the list
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Well I, for one, can remember seeing porn passed round in school (paper-based, in the days before the internet). Plenty of interest in actual sex as well, and clearly some people were succeeding looking at the number of pregnancies...
Looking at current statistics and surveys I see no reason to believe it is any different now. I think the figures are around 1% of UK 13-15yr old girls are acutally getting pregnant, so the % of that age group having sex must be much higher, and the % looking at porn is most likely higher still.
I see no reason why the OLPC users should be any different from other schoolchildren - so, if they can use it to find porn, they almost certainly will.
Great 5 million laptops all needing more power. Say 100W per laptop, 500MW extra power is now needed to run them, allowing for 1/3 loss due to transport of said electricity and thats nigh on 700WM!?
If they are being deployed in developing countries you can be the power comes from fossile fuels (being cheap and readily available, heck it's why the developed world uses them. Plus the UN/US wont let anyone else have nuclear technology as there is a potential bomb-risk).
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
These machines are substantially below the market value, in particular the built in mesh networking is interesting. What's going to happen is that they will be diverted in large numbers to places like ebay. What would you do if you were handed something worth a year's salary? To stop that they'll have to release the units generally to the public, hell it's even a good idea, the increased production would reduce the cost per unit significantly and will subsidise the educational version. "The first units will be closer to 100 Euros than 100 dollars," admits Bletsas. Of course the dollar has dropped in value by 40% over the period the OLPC has been in creation, so perhaps it isn't the best standard to compare the price against.
Deleted
...was too much to ask
The final selection for power generation has yet to be made; it will be a yo-yo-like device that can be pulled by hand or foot, with a strap that can attached it to a belt or table. The yo-yo generates around 10 watts, while the XO consumes a mere 3 watts in non-intensive computing. This means, for example, that that for every 10 minutes of power generation, a child should be able to surf the internet for a half hour.
"You have to look at this through the needs of a child [in the developing world]. A child doesn't want to play the latest video games. he wants to be able to read a book."
- Bletsas
They may be in the third world, but believing that most children would rather read an e-book than play a video game seems a bit out of touch. And before the rabbid Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter fans chime in, a couple things to keep in mind are that not all children can read, and of those who can and want to read, books tend to occupy less of their time [anecdotal I know, but seems intuitive] than most other activities (including playing video games).
It would not surprise me if others have brought this up, but I have not seen it.
Is the target market for this thing really those kids we see on the Christian Children's Fund adds? If they are, I think a better goal for the worlds resources would be something like "A pair of shoes for every chilled" I would imagine that starving people in the Sudan, or wherever they end up distributing these things, will pass them of in a heartbeat if it gets them a meal for a day.
If the goal is to give computers to people who don't have them, a good place to start would be in developed and nearly developed countries. Right here in the US, 2000 census claims 42% of American households have a computer, and only 22% have internet access. That leaves millions of kids in American schools who don't have a computer. I think they, and those like them in other countries, should be the real targets of a project like this.
Don't judge me by my spelling
They will be children using these devices, you prick.
Children who, for the most part, probably get to see a modicum of real life fucking going on.
Most of the world does not operate by the prudish to the point of psychosis standards of Peoria. They live too close to the metal of reality.
KFG
One thing that I notices when I read the article is that the distributors were suggesting that for most failures other than an LCD failure the thing would probably just be discarded.
That suggests that in the not to distant future we could have millions of these things in the dumps of the third-world countries ill-equipped to process the waste. There is no mention of whether this has been considered, or if these devices may be RoHS compliant. I kind of doubt it, considering the (slightly at present) higher cost of RoHS compliant equipment and manufacturing.
I really really like the mesh networking.
There is no way that Phone or Network hardware companies can make it happen. There is no question about the future being mesh, but the issue is when.
I am sick too, similar situation. Sorry.
I just really care about this project, it means a lot to me and I believe in it. I guess I get really defensive about all the FUD being spread about it. Here's an example of a website set up as a FUD/astroturfing thing whose purpose is to make people see the OLPC as a very bad thing:
http://olpcnews.com/
You see enough of this crap and then you start to get kind of upset (at least, I do). I don't know who hired that guy, for instance, but they really ought to be ashamed.
"The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project plan to release the machine on general sale next year." according to the BBC.
and it will be twice the price (so $300 seems about right as they cost $150 to make at the moment)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Speaking as a publisher, there is no chance whatsoever that children's textbooks need to cost twenty bucks each to print.
Go for it, you find me quotes from printers for runs of over five thousand books where they cost any more than, oh, five bucks apiece. And that is assuming conventional paper, hardcover (which is, btw, a terrible design approach compared to, say, tyvek over soft plastic), and the book being the awkward size and design of "normal" textbooks.
But then what would I know? I've only done textbook production work for Harcourt-Brace, Houghton-Mifflin, and Scholastic, not to mention collateral materials and periodicals production for The Trumpet Club, Time, Inc., McGraw-Hill, and, oh, right, my own publishing company.
No, the pricing of textbooks is a result of back-assed production systems, government contractor pricing, schoolbook adoption board warping of design, and terrible legacy choices related to all of the above. And with new digital printing systems coming on line all the time, real world limitations are dropping every year.
Admittedly, I'm delighted at all of the above. I'm just now bringing my first bound products to press and I expect to underprice the buggers by fifty to eighty percent.
But don't believe them when they tell you their mahooah about printing costs. You might as well take Halliburton's word for it on their costs.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
"I would imagine that starving people in the Sudan, or wherever they end up distributing these things, will pass them of in a heartbeat if it gets them a meal for a day"
The people of Sudan and elsewhere are starving because of continual civil war brought on by the use of other technology sold them by the west, namely GUNS. Providing them with the OLPC and a meal are not necessarly mutually exclusive.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/
http://www.ecosonline.org/back/aboutus.html
Is this really the best idea (Score:1)
davecb5620@gmail.com
. . . reading this makes me cry a little. I think I love you, AMD.
I have a copy of the OS and I must admit it definitely is a bit confusing. The icons are not really all that intuitive. (I played with it inside of a VM)
What would happen if you put them over here? For simplicity, let's say that every kid in every decent-sized city has one of these things. The mesh could potentially spread across the entire city. Which means a total blanket of Internet access. Do you have any idea exactly how, in a word, PISSED the telecoms would be about this?
Wait, that gives me an idea!
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
2 1/2 seconds of lifting the brick to the ceiling if you're a bit clever.
I had to noodle on that a moment before the image became clear. Good one! And I think right in line with the kind of creative interaction that OLPC hopes the kids will get into.
I don't like the idea of the OLPC because there is some fundamental problem that needs to be fixed before that. That is, a good deal of the so called third world countries that will need it aren't democracies. Now, what gain would it be if you give the chance to obtain information that has been already altered and censored? I'd say to worry about that problem first.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
"It canniblizes our other sales"
Really, now? The Marine corps wants to carry iMacs into battle?
"It puts us in marketplaces we can't afford to focus on."
Oh, you mean like education, already a core market, and vertical stuff like insurance that is vastly profitable?
"There was never really any demand."
Funny, that's not what, say, Infoworld said, let alone teachers, doctors, mobile salespeople, and, as mentioned above, the U.S. Marine Corps.
"Shareholders are upset about all that investment in plant."
So better to just write it all off and cut your profit numbers down further?
"We can't afford the distraction from important projects."
As CNet showed two months ago, the Newton is still better than most of what's out there. And from the scuttlebutt I heard from folks inside Apple, there were plenty of people wanting to buy the rights to the molds, the IP, the whole damn package. Apple (read Jobs and buddies) was just too snitty to accept any of the offers.
I'm impressed by what I'm seeing about the iPhone, though a little more comparison to the Nokia 800 and various Psions would be appreciated. But this is pissant compared to what we would have now if we had gotten TEN FRICKIN' YEARS more improvement of the Newton.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
I thought OLPC was based on Fedora Core sponsored by Red Hat Inc. so I wouldn't worry.
"Those machines may not see a network connection after they are sold, so the software has to be right first time. It also has to be secure.
If they won't be seeing a network then how would security be a problem.
However, the OLPC folks seem unworried:
Do you have any links or citations that quotes Bletsas as saying this?
was: Software (Score:5, Interesting)
davecb5620@gmail.com
I'm sure they never thought of that. It probably never occurred to them these things might be used in sunny places. You should be on the design team.
The Sugar UI looks very interesting. Jeff Atwood wrote about this just the other day. Its kind of refreshing to see a project like this break new ground in other areas besides hardware. Unfortunately there have been rumors that there has been zero usability testing so far. And yes, you can test it out for yourself, but maybe it would be even better to let your kid try it and email them the results.
But whatever the object, you must keep him praying to it. To the thing he has made, not to the person that has made him.
Something I was wondering in general (but which might apply well for OLPC laptops due to the lower processing power) is if it would be feasible to implement a multicomputer parallel processing capability. That is, use the mesh network to divide processing between multiple laptops, based on a language like Erlang (if it requires substantial changes or simplification maybe give it a new name like IntErlang). I imagine it would use a BitTorrent approach to managing jobs and transferring data, and the connected laptops each run a safe process that handles computation & calculation (like is done with SETI@home).
Doing all this would seem to create a virtual community-based supercomputer, but I don't know enough to identify if there are any showstoppers.
According to TFA: "In general, the XO uses what Bletsas calls 'Extreme Suspend,' going to sleep after two seconds of inactivity, but waking up within 300 milliseconds of an action."
When I'm reading something online, I don't scroll more frequently than two seconds. I would probably find something else to do if I had to keep jogging the touch pad to keep the display active. Maybe I'm misinterpreting this?
Ah, let them have sex, at least that's not harmful to the environment ...
... as if not enough spam is coming out of those countries already ... and when kids learn how to get money from stupid people all over the world, what do you thing they will do?
What worries me is countries like Nigeria and Rwanda being among the largest recipients of this toy
"a good deal of the so called third world countries that will need it aren't democracies"
But then again neither is the US or its satellite in Europe, GB ltd. For decades protests were allowed across the road from the House of Commons, but not any more. It took the party of the workers to sneek in the leglisation, over the weekend and while parliament was on holiday. Eight arrested in Iraq protest
was: I don't think the OLPC is a good idea
davecb5620@gmail.com
and before we worry about delivery method ... shouldn't someone verify that the target user can ... read? Literacy rates in the target countries are probably not what they are in the developed economies. Before worrying about distributing text books, OLPC hopefully will figure out how to overcome the possible problem that the user can't understand anything but the picture on the screen. And if the pictures on the screen resemble a "desktop", would that have any meaning to a typical user?
I just realized, if we make entire generations of young children in developing nations into computer geeks who can't get laid, we'll also solve the developing world's problems with:
1. Overpopulation
2. Teen pregnancy
3. AIDS and other STDs
Now I'm even more in favor of the OLPC project!
From TFA: "One way that costs are being kept down is to deliver the units en-masse to governments for delivery along the same channel as they currently use for textbooks, keeping the OLPC out of the distribution business. 'If we were selling this laptop through normal consumer channels, it would be more like a $250 laptop.'"
My guess is that the implicit $150 "savings" in distribution cost -- which is a cost shift (to developing economies) and not a cost savings -- is based on distribution costs in developed economies. I would expect distribution costs to be higher in developing economies, simply because, by definition, they don't have the infrastructure comparable to developed economies. (Yes, that's why we call them "developed"!)
Of course, if the purchasing governments simply distribute the units without regard to politics or greed, maybe they'll have lower costs, but it seems more likely that the costs that OLPC has shifted to the governments of developing economies will be shifted downstream, one way or another. "Yes, we have laptops for everyone, but you must come to Tripoli to pick them up."
those are the books we want kids to read anyway. I don't expect Literature classes to teach the works of Tom Clancy or Stephen King
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
Those library books don't get handled every day. I've been told by someone who worked in library preservation that regular hardcover bindings are good for (and I'm probably messing up these numbers) about twenty checkout-return cycles, whereas the more expensive library bindings they had done would be good for about a hundred before they needed to be rebound. (The library actually preferred to purchase paperbacks and have them rebound, because the hardcover bindings were expensive and comparatively fragile.)
The point is that library books may not be in constant, daily use; you might be comparing apples to oranges here.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"One thing that I notices when I read the article is that the distributors were suggesting that for most failures other than an LCD failure the thing would probably just be discarded"
.. So projects like Computer Aid International should be banned. Incidentally the cost of these free computers usually works out at around £10,720 per 20ft container.
He didn't actually say discarded, what he said they would be repaired at government depots or replaced.
"There is no mention of whether this has been considered, or if these devices may be RoHS compliant"
You're kidding right?
was: Toss em in the dump? (Score:1)
davecb5620@gmail.com
If you must!
Selling the laptop via an eBay store (especially when being sponsored by ebay corp.) actually makes sense. eBay already has the server-rack space, huge bandwidth, order processing capabilities and other online-retail amenities at the scale needed for something like this to work well. This makes it an easy step for the OLPC project to go retail without having to reinvent the wheel.
This is a reflective display, so it doesn't need a backlight. There is a special chip to keep it going when everything else is shut down. This requires very little power.
You just made my day!
This is the best news I've had in quite some time. I'll definetly get one for me and one for my girlfriend... and two kids somewhere in the world will get theirs because of us. And all this in under 500 euro total. AWESOME!
_The Shining_ is often considered a "literary classic". A lot of the "literature" you read got that way simply because it's old. Much of it is still pretty much crap.
Have they solved this problem yet? The decision to go with Marvell (instead of some better supported chip, say, RealTek) seems to be arbitrary rather than informed.
The choice of Marvell Wifi chip contradicts the very philosophical goal of OLPC itself. Disgusting.
Granted, I love the OLPC idea, but the addiditon of millions of kids to the internet all at once can't be good... Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling. Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes... Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave. Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria
Before you post on Slashdot....shouldn't you verify that you.....read TFA?
OLPC is an educational tool to be distributed through a local educational system. It will be used in conjuction with teachers in classroom activities.
This argument is kind of like the other typical slashdotter OLPC canard: "shouldn't we feed them first, I mean how can they learn if they are starving???"
The developing world is not all alike. There are levels and levels, with different needs. OLPC is aimed at some and not others. But most people have never been "there" (be it Vietnam or Kenya), and just have a cartoon vision of what it's like. That would be like, uhm, projecting from inexperience.
Whereas The Shining is both new(ish) and crap (seriously -- cite me a respectable source that really claims it's a literary classic)
This is really poised to be a disrupter.
RTFM.
That's all nice. Now when are you going to address the other side of the equation? The costs to create a book? Not the printing costs. Not the distribution costs.* The costs from author all the way to final typesetting. Or the costs of all the failures?
*If that really was the issue, then outsourcing would have taken root in the book industry. Chinese labour and production with a distribution system to match.
Could a World Education Council codevelop an Open Source Education?
Based off of free resources such as Project Gutenberg
and Wikipedia.
A great deal of basic education is 1. Old 2. Redundant
Math, Science, Language, all 'Open Source' to begin with if you think about it.
Only when you get into culture, social studies, politics, religion, do differences among cultures begin to diverge.
How about it ?
A Global Education, not sourced on any one country/politics/belief system,
teaching the needed skills of math, logic, science, reading, speaking.
...from the {MP,RI}AA against children who got OLPC laptops and got creative.
...from the {MP,RI}AA against the OLPC people, claiming that the machines are a breeding ground of copyright violations as they don't have DRM pre-equipped.
We all know that they just love negative publicity.
Yes yes, I know about (or can readily surmise) the various hurdles and impracticalities of suing a child on the other side of the planet. If you took that seriously, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
This post is NOT a troll.
0 7EED7163FF937A15750C0A9639C8B63&sec=health
So many rich, spoilt yanks (I am a rich, spoilt Brit) are posting to this discussion as if they have something to contribute based on their western decadent upbringing. The fact is that they are not even planning for a single one of these machines to end up in the US of A. They are intended to go to THE THIRD WORLD.
The third world consists of a great many places where buying even 1 text book for each child would break the bank for the government.
If you are going to contribute something to this discussion please try and put yourself in the position of a child in africa, who has no toys other that what they can make themselves, probably very few books and can only go to school once per week as that is all the country can afford teachers for.
As for talking about eye strain, please follow the link below and read up about the infant mortality rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality
In short, the kids have far worse things to worry about than eye strain, like dying of Aids because some western drug company wants a bit more profit and put the price beyond what poor countries can afford because it makes more profit in the west.
And when a country refuses to follow western drug patent laws like India, did the US of A government lobbies the WTO until the country gets financially punished for trying to save some lives. (more links below)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=8684
The idea of the OLPC program is that by providing children in the third world with a decent education we can try and level the playing field in the future and enable these countries to better compete with us economically in the west. This has to done soon or the gap between rich countries and poor will become so huge that the idea of joining some looney religious sect that promotes suicide bombing will become very appealing.
If you knew that there was a high chance of dieing of starvation you might just commit suicide too, especially if you have had to watch someone starve to death as this is supposedly one of the worst ways to go. As it is a great many people from the third world are willing to risk some pretty hairy sea voyages on home made rafts just to end up in our countries and work for less than we would consider. Fast forward 10 years and who knows how bad things will get.
Once again, this post is not a troll, so please don't moderate it as such just because you dont like hearing anything bad said about the US or its residents.
I dont read
While a noble effort by the OLPC, have they really thought this true? Who is going to provide support for 5 million notebooks? Will there be authorized local service centres where kids can take them after they've been dropped? How long are these things supposed to last?
>There's absolutely no reason in the world why we shouldn't have a complete set of open content textbooks covering all of a basic liberal education
0 Books.htm o ks_on_one_website
Agreed, tho the $100M you mention seems more than should be needed; Wikipedia just raised nearly $1M all from small donations. I can't believe that textbooks for the basic 4 subjects, math, reading, science, history, for 1-8th grade, couldn't be written by a small group of writers in a year for $1M. I bet if you offered a bounty, like 'RentACoder' on two smaller projects, one that created the 'table of contents' for the books, then another to actually write all the chapters, you'd end up with free-to-use e-books that could be used by any district that wished.
Maybe some of these 'free textbook' sites are a good place to start:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.businessbookmall.com/Free%20Business%2
http://digg.com/tech_news/Hundreds_of_Free_Textbo
http://www.textbookrevolution.org/