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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
Books are also very expensive. Even in mass production, a non-trivial book can cost around $20 each, and smaller run books are much more expensive due to (lack of) economy of scale.
Not to mention that large-scale distribution is not inexpensive, especially in the market areas for one of these laptops (poor infrastructure makes shipping more expensive). I imagine a government could actually save a good amount of money (if the laptops prove successful and long-lasting) by giving school children one of these laptops and then just having digital textbooks.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
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?
Exactly. It's the same as with girls. The digital version is much cheaper than the exteriorized rib edition.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's great, until you realize that ebooks hardly cost less than physical books.
I'll admit that there's quite a few free ebooks, but the majority of them are 'literary classics' that a child couldn't read if it wanted to and college-level textbooks that a child couldn't read if it wanted to.
If they can get some ebook publishers to donate books for use on these OLPCs that'll be great, but I'm not holding my breath. With the exception of MIT, Gutenberg and Baen.com, I haven't seen a lot of generosity in the form of books. (Physical or electronic.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
As I recall from the couple OLPC mailing lists that I read, they did (and continue to do?) a lot of LCD and overall 'destructive' testing. The LCD was sourced very carefully can contains a special UV filter, in fact last I heard there was a 'desert' and 'not desert' version of that to deal with the different environments. Similarly, they've done a lot of battery testing and there are improvements that will go into the revised and more final hardware.
The OLPC does not contain any real moving parts (hard disk, etc) and the motherboard is behind the LCD panel, not under the keyboard (where the battery is). The processor runs nice and cool (in fact, it's underclocked).
I worked at one for a while and it was a welcome relief from my 'burn your lap' ThinkPad with a PIII : ) That said, proper suspect and power management isn't done yet, so they have a lot more to do in these areas.
I live in Argentina, which is one of the target countries for OLPC. Daily through the streets of Buenos Aires I come across many many indigent children who either beg for money, perform little juggling acts for coins, sell small items or collect cardboard and other materials from the trash which they later sell. These kids were usually found as well in Arcades, playing with some hard earned coins, out of someone's good will, or hungrily peeking over someone's shoulder. They normally play real good and act as on-site advisers for kids with money to play. When Arcades started disappearing in favor of small joints dedicated to on-line games, they moved over... and now they sometimes spend hard earned change for an hour of Counterstrike (historically the most successful on-line game for this kind of places). ... So I assure you... poor kids certainly do care about games, and I have no reason to think they'd rather read a book.
And if you aim higher, towards the working class children, the lower middle class, or middle class, then there's no question either: as a rule kids don't like to read in this country. I think it's likely that overall children books are less popular here than in the US, and reading in adults is less popular as well. Kids normally don't like school or studying (no surprise here, I guess), and they avoid it as much as they can. We don't have SAT exams here, or any other kind of exam which require a certain level (except for some high schools which have an acceptance exam), so most kids stick to getting marks just high enough as to pass the class.
So I can't imagine why someone would think that kids would rather use the computer to read a book than to play games. What I would believe, is that many kids would rather chat and browse through social network sites (Fotolog.com is very popular in Argentina and Brasil) than play games. Girls specially. In fact, I'm really happy that thanks to SMS and IM apps, kids now have a reason to read and write ten times more than they did before... even if they do it in garbled kl00l3z-5p34k. I'd like teachers to embrace this fact and help kids improve their on-line writing.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
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.
Remember that even if the electronic edition costs the same per child, the non-trivial costs of transportation will be removed from the equation.
If you take out some or part of the cost of printing, the deal becomes even sweeter.
This is a win-win situation - the price of the books go down because they don't need to be printed. This means more books are sold at a possibly higher profit margin. The books can get as large as needed because they are not on paper - encyclopedias can grow to unlimited size. The children have more books because the government can afford more and thus, I hope, the children get a better education and economy improves. And because they don't pollute when are made or transported, the environment wins.
Come on... It's an easy sell.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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