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OLPC Project Rollout Begins In Uruguay
Acer500 writes "The One Laptop Per Child project became a reality Thursday in Uruguay, as the 160 children of school number 24 in the humble town of Cardal received their XO computers. The learning tools came directly from the hands of president Tabaré Vazquez. It has become a matter of national pride that Uruguay is the first country to realize the project's goal. The target is that by 2009, every school-age child in Uruguay will have one, and an initial 15 million dollars have already been allocated to the project.
From the newspaper articles: 'The happiness of having a PC in their hands, some of them for the first time, had the kids in ecstasy, which didn't wait to turn on their computers, introduce their personal information (required the first time they're turned on), choose the screen colors, and start experimenting with them. What initially made them more enthusiastic was the possibility of taking photographs and filming each others with the included webcams.'" More information below.
According to the unofficial blog of the Uruguayan project, named proyecto Ceibal, the infrastructure for wireless is not yet in place but will be provided in the next few days by the national telco ANTEL. No photos of the event have been posted online, but you can see an institutional video on Youtube. One interesting point is that it has not yet been decided that the XO will be the laptop of choice for the entire project. Two other companies want to be considered: Intel, with their Classmate PC, and Israeli-manufactured ITP-C. In a press conference, Intel manager for the southern cone Esteban Galluzzi went as far as to compare the XO to a Pentium II, and stressed that the Classmate is able to run Windows XP. As advisor and local guru Juan Grompone stated, 'who will ultimately benefit from this is education?' This will be an interesting test to see if the OLPC project meets its intended goals of 'learning learning'. Let's hope this project is the means that will foster among some of the children the desire to learn and to tinker."
Sorry, but I think the venerable fish is becoming exhausted. Here's World Lingo's version, with my own small tuneups.
The Web is in the air of Cardal
About 40 children of an Italian school received its computers by the good will of several authorities of the government. In one week the children should be able to connect to Internet from all the points of the city.
In the middle of great expectation and much joy of the children, president Tabaré Vázquez stood next to a great retinue of authorities of School #24 of the city of Cardal, which inaugurated the pilot program of the Ceibal Plan in the Italian school (in Florida). In the next few days it should be connected to Internet by means of wireless connections, in order that the students can accede to the Web from their homes.
In a brief speech during the act, Vázquez talked about "the importance" of the Ceibal project and assured that "she will fulfill herself the deadline of 2009 to cover all the schools of the country". The agent chief executive preferred to yield his time to one of the children.
At the end of the act, Vázquez was consulted by the present journalists on the matter of cuts in the budget, and if she were going to be able to supply all the money for the plan. Vázquez assured that she was not going to lack the money. "the US$ 15 million are predicted in the budget", assured the conductor the Uruguayan government.
Under the gaze of many parents, some from the accommodated windows or in some corner of the halls class, about 40 children of 3rd and 6th year received their computers X-O. The donation of Nicholas Negroponte is of 200 units. The rest of the students of that school of Cardal will receive its computers in the next few days.
The chance to have a PC in its hands, some for the first time, excited the boys, who did not hope to ignite their machines, to introduce their initial preferences (the first time that boot the machine it is necessary to put the machine name and to choose the colors of the screen) and to prepare to experiment with the X-O. What further it excited them was to be able to take photos and to film themselves with on-board webcam.
Later this week, the children should be able to connect to the Italian School, where an official arrived to provide the school with connection in the classrooms. In the next days this coverage is supposed to extend to the rest of the city so that the children can connect themselves to the Web from their homes. For this, wireless connection technology will be used, supplied by ANTEL with the collaboration provided with UTE.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Translation: "Not him, but it seems the foreign devils lack a little culture and respect for others. I don't mean to offend anyone. Shoutout to my Uruguayan homies. The South will rise again!"
I may have lost some things in translation due to regional dialects.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
From a fellow Uruguayan. Here are the article acronyms:
ANTEL: Administracion Nacional de TELecomunicaciones (Government owned telephone company)
UTE: Administracion Nacional de Usinas y Transmiciones Electricas (Government owned electricity company)
ANEP: Administracion Nacional de Educacion Publica (Public schools administration)
LATU: Laboratorio Tecnologico del Uruguay (Technological Laboratory of Uruguay [Equivalent of NIST in the USA])
The Classmate isn't running XP Professional, but XP Embedded, which gives you a stripped-down version of XP, including only the components you want (in great detail). It doesn't have to have anything it won't need. Though with Windows, you get to run Windows software *and* open-source software. The only reason to go with anything else would be licensing costs, not functionality-wise.
You're missing out the battery life on the OLPC, but typically, lower MHz ~= higher battery life, which for a kids computer is probably actually the better idea.
... and it's still more pleasant to read on a high res screen with larger character sizes. )
I have no idea where you get the weird idea that screen size is more important than resolution. That's just.... wrong. (you can fit more pixels = more letters on a higher res screen... even if you need a magnifying glass to still see them all
Windows XP or Linux by themselves are both not-so-handy, they don't cater to kids.
TPM does not help you secure your own computer, AFAIK.
Nature Magazine has a cautious news story lauding the OLPC while pointing out what nay sayers observe. One concern is that the way they are achieving the price point is to push the marketing, distribution, and maintenence cost onto the buyers (the governements) and that they need to reach scale quickly, which while it probably will happen governments are demurring. If this roll out is a success it may be a big shot in arm convincing the hesitant governments. Perhaps the easiest places to get support will be one-man governments; Would-be "populist" quasi-dictators like Qudaffi is a prime candidate for a large purchase.
There's also an interesting interview with Ron Minnich of LinuxBios, who points out that the OLPC will be a major roll out for OLPC in end user hands (rather than embeds). He says that LinuxBios enables such insanely better power management than traditional bios that it's going to knock everyone's socks off. It will wake instantaneously and conserve power.
Even when operating this thing is miserly: 2 watts.
One of the suggested alternatives in the Nature Article put forward by a prominent nay sayer in India (who will not be going forward with OLPC) are that set-top style web-based apps are a better idea. I Don't actually see how. All the set top boxes currently are more expensive, don't have a screen, the screen will be too far away for it's resolution, and they don't have Key boards. So the OLPC looks pretty good.
The OLPC will automatically detect networks. I wonder if Ron Minnich managed to slide in his other project which is BPROC/Clustermatic which is used at Labs like Los Alamos to create high performance self configuring clusters with minimal cluster operating system overhead. Such a system could provide some incredible computing horsepower despite the low performance of the individual nodes.
Another thing I wonder about is printers. In the developed world anyone who can afford a computer can afford or get access to a printer so paper has never really been factored out of computing. INdeed computers if anything, are an organized way to generate more not less paper docs. In the countries using OLPC, printers won't be available. We may see the rise of paperless computing finally.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Hint: There is a reason why Intel and AMD are focusing strongly on improving their idle power usage. And it ain't because they have nothing better to do.
Most of the time my E6600 sits here at 1.6Ghz even with firefox, audacious, etc going. For MOST of my tasks the box is just plain too fast. Of course, as a software developer I do put it through it's paces. Point is for most people who read webpages, listen to music, watch a movie, whatever, processors are VASTLY overpowered for what they do. Not every one is doing "make -j5", re-encoding live video, or whatever.
I'd bet that for most if you simply told them "it's really fast" and then didn't load a bloatware OS and tools on it they wouldn't know the difference.
Of course if Intel started just selling 1GHz cores and said "listen folks, you really aren't using the core anyways, so why waste the energy and wafer yield?" they wouldn't be able to sell $300 processors. Of course they would cost a lot less I guess anyways since the yield would be higher... hmmm...
Point is, XO is just fine with a "P2 class" processor.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yep, we're 3rd world, but we don't exactly live in huts and eat each other. In fact, Uruguay already has a very strong software exports sector (in fact I run an indie game dev company) and Internet access is ubiquitous. I guess the über hackers are already wrecking havoc ;)
No, really, ask Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay ), most people are surprised to learn that Uruguay is very different to the typical first world stereotype of "third world", "south american" and "latin" people.
My website
Fret not, as Nicholas Negroponte has stated "It's an education project, not a laptop project."
This is not some new hair brained lets throw laptops at 3rd world countries plan as many try to make it out to be. If you do a little research into the project you'll find that it was started years ago with various test implementations using standard laptops running Windows software. The OLPC is an extension of original work performed by these people so they probably have a pretty good idea about what they are doing and what they need to make the project a success.
As someone that has a XO (OLPC) I'll say that it is way better than any cheapie laptop I've seen. If it was available for retail purchase here in the US I'd buy several to pass out as gifts. The quality is great and it really has a lot to offer for such a low price tag. I mean it comes with the ability to participate in a mesh network and be connected to a normal wifi AP at the same time, has a decent built in camera, has a pad for pen input, is very durable, is very lightweight, stays cool, has a decent battery life, has features that make it usable as an ebook or handheld game, the software is custom written to take advantage of the laptop and work within its limited specs, and is just pretty damn cute. Every kid I've tested it on has loved it as have most adults. And remember that they actually plan to get production costs down to under $100 per laptop and then start distributing low-cost add-ons such as an OLPC printer. Your average cheapie laptop is not going to be the same.
That said, I can't believe they are distributing the XO to kids already. The software is not done at all. IMO the software is barely usable thus far. Work on the software is progressing pretty fast, and in fact that is why I have an unit, but I would not yet be distributing them with the software in it's current state. I hope they have easy access to the units being distributed so they can be updated as needed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Hi! I am the mantainer of the blog referred in the article, http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com./ First of all, I'd like to invite you to see some pictures of the launching of the project in my last post (I decided to include some contents in english on the blog).
I have seen many interesting comments here. Many of them are part of a discussion that exceeds uruguayan experience, as they are the technological apsects (using XO, Classmate, ITP-C...? using laptops or desktops...?), educational aspects (which contents to use, if all the children will be interested) and, obviously, economical aspects (is it worth spending so much money?... how much will the project really cost?). I just would like to make some comments:
- Not only the educational aspects of the project have to be analyzed. The project also changes the "digital gap", taking into the information society many children and their families.
- The technologies used are not as important as the agreements we have to do for using these technologies. License costs and their renewals, as well as intelectual properties of the contents generated must get up in the table.
- The real effect of a project like this will not be seen in the next days, months, neither in a few years. Maybe in 10 years we will be able to start doing a comprehensive analysis of results. Now we are making "futurology", so it is normal having different views. What is important in this step is the conviction and honesty of stakeholders to try to make things as good as possible.
Regards, Pablo Flores
> The only reason to go with anything else would be licensing costs, not functionality-wise.
that's far from being true. i suggest that you read up (sorry, no links, as i got it from a presentation by OLPC security guy) about *purely technological* challenges the OLPC project had and, first of all, admire their work, and then appreciate the fact that there's *no way in HELL* they could pull that off with off-the-shelf OS, even embedded.
in some places, such as power management, they literally had to pull the guts out of linux and put their stuff back in (of course, many patches are flowing upstream, but some work is simply too specific to the hardware).
for example, this machine actually goes to deep sleep every several SECONDS, if there's no activity, and display refresh goes down to 0 hz. the wakeup time has to be on the order of a hundred milliseconds max, or the user experience will be degraded. now, if you ever had your traditional laptop go to sleep and wake up, you know that the time it takes to do so is measured in seconds at best, if not minutes. OLPC developers had to toss out the existing ACPI sleep system and write their own, complete, with kernel support. result? huge power savings and they almost made to under 100 ms of wakeup time. now, you go to microsoft and say "hey, we're this charity organization, developing laptops for children, and we have this problem with acpi. could you please rewrite your OS power management for us? kthx."
then there's mesh computing - the mesh is running even when the cpu is asleep and uses unique protocols to self-organize. the lust goes on, and on, and on. having Linux to start with has been a huge win for these guys.
I lived in Uruguay for several years in the late 90's. The Uruguayans as a whole are very educated. The dictators there took over not because of ignorance, but because nobody was capable of resisting them. I spoke to many Uruguayans about that time period. The consensus was that those leading the military coup had guns. Those who wanted to resist did not. It's something I think about every time the 2nd amendment arguments come up. (no, I'm not a gun owner).