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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...
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!"
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?
And that, in a nutshell, is why the next generation of US and European kids are going to be serving coffee and noodles to the highly motivated, well educated immigrants who will be doing all the real work by then.
RTFA - they run on average at 3W and will include a hand or foot cranked "Yoyo" for charging. Presumably in the countries they're going to solar power would be an option too.
"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).
No, you did not read the article did you? The XO consumes between 350 milliWatt when only it's only meshing, and 5 Watt when it's doing heavy multimedia applications. It can be powered by handpower/solar/ or a generator running off all the hot gas you produce when you open your mouth.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
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.
"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.
"A child doesn't want to play the latest video games. he wants to be able to read a book."
The children that this will help DO want to read a book. In order to reach the kids who will matter, one must offer opportunity to the group.
Let's face it, most PEOPLE, anywhere, don't amount to sh1t. That is not a problem. Reaching the few who will learn and use that learning along with the personal ambition and ability to succeed matters.
Geeks and technically able people are a minority in ALL countries, but we matter.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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!
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
If you must!
An abundance of (interesting) reading material is a pretty fundamental tool in developing literacy.
...", which has little to do with the prospects for educating the developing economies, as a public policy proposition. I'm sure 20 years from now, some superstar rags-to-riches success story will in fact be profiled as having been inspired in his/her journey to the top of the Fortune Global 1000 by reading Ayn Rand on his hand-cranked PC. But the masses won't be educated simply by putting books on the machine (again, something that I think seems like a pretty good idea, but not a sufficient one in and of itself).
...
I agree; but I didn't learn to read just by sitting next to a pile of books. People read to me, etc. Note that I didn't claim putting books on the machine was a bad idea. I'm just questioning whether it's sufficient and also pointing out that the discussion of which specific literature might be best, regardless of whether it shows how erudite other posters might have been as wunderkinds.
TFA indicates that the UI is language-free.
TFA was also not written by anyone with experience teaching children in developing countries how to read. I'm not one of those, either. I'm just suggesting that consultation with those types of experts seems more important than, again, debating which specific sophisticated literature was most important to which specific child genius here in the developed world. Also, language-free doesn't mean culture-free. That doesn't mean it won't work, just that such basic considerations might be key determinants in the success of the concept. I'll bet you don't have any trouble mapping objects on your Windows screen to "objects" of your intellectual domain. I don't really know which of them is too tightly bound to developed-economy culture to be meaningful to an illiterate child in Libya, but it wouldn't surprise me if some meaningful fraction of them don't find the icons "intuitive".
I posted this comment mostly because I saw the thread running into the realm of "well, when I was 2 months old, I read
Related response to the next criticism of my OP
>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/