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'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.
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.
You don't have to take their word for it; you can grab the complete software stack and test it yourself, if you want. The OLPC team provide OS images that you can use to run the software in any x86 virtualization platform (they recommend qemu, but people have it running in VMWare and Parallels as well).
It's worth checking out just to see their new "Sugar" UI -- which is pretty cool IMHO.
Read my blog.
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.
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.