Slashdot Mirror
Lessons To Learn From The OLPC Project
FixedSpelling writes "Whether you're impressed with it or not, the XO-1 could have a major impact on notebook design. The concept behind the OLPC's development brings outside-the-box thinking and cost-consciousness to a level that we rarely see in portable computing. There are a number of lessons that can be learned the from its unique design and we can already see that some of these concepts have been noticed by manufacturers. 'The biggest attraction to the OLPC project has always been the price of the system. You don't have to be a cynic to understand that the impact of a $100 notebook could be huge and the price has generated the majority of the interest in the project. Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better. The low price was originally important so that the XO-1 could be produced in large quantities without putting too much of a burden on the buyer but the low cost appeals to everyone.'"
I like the crank. If only I could power my laptop, cell phone, etc that way.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
And then used the money to lower the price. Not something I would personally do, but seems like a popular fad.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
... and when will they be available for sale in the US?
wtf is an olpc?
Well if you don't want to RTFA, or search google, or wikipedia: Its One Laptop Per Child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olpc
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
"Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently" By what percent of notebook users? This does not happen all the time in my universe. Unsupported generalizations in a submission make me want to mod the whole thread down.
The greatest lesson to be learned from this is that not everyone thinks that a super, ultra, mega, turbo powerful and equally as powerful processor is what they need. It was exactly what i was telling somebody at work today. If you are into playing games, rendering video, editing really hi-res photos, or doing music editing...need a REALLY powerful machine, with a LOT of ram (actually if you are doing any of these as your job, you should probably be using a mac). However, if you are like me, and your laptop is more or less a thin client that connects to other machines via either Remote Desktop or SSH, then the cheapest, most durable, lightest, and most efficient laptop is EXACTLY what you need.
If I could buy a pallet of these things and run rdesktop and OpenVPN on them, half of my users would be using them from home.
hell, $100 bucks is cheaper than my friggin blackberry! and i bet it doesn't get confused when you throw anything but txt based email at it!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
That due to the economics of inflation a $100 laptop really costs $200.
Wouldn't you rather pay $2,000 to have your $100 laptop sent to a special clean room facility to recover the data?
What I love the most about the OLPC is the key that lets you show the source code (in python!) of the app in use. Which you can modify. and if you mess it up, revert. I'm astonished to see this concept from smalltalk and Alan Kay live on. It couldn't be a better idea. We were having a discussion in a strategy session at my daughters' small montessori school (which goes thru 6th grade), where we were bemoaning the lack of imaginative uses of technology in the classrooms. Beyond a student-produced newsletter and using word processors to write reports... nothing. Nobody seems to know what to do. But the OLPC is taking the lead in saying kids can and should be allowed to do so much more - the mere fact that here you are given a facility to modify your complex tools should be revolutionary.
must... stay... awake...
If it's too cheap to be true, it probably is.
I'm seriously thinking about it. It's possible that the machine will be so nice that I'll use it for my regular light duty stuff (email and basic surfing). Given the current state of the Internet, I actually feel like it's less likely that the donated machine will help the target kid, but it's supposed to be the thought that counts, eh?
However, I wish the twofer offer had a provision for donating the second machine if it's too far from tolerable for my uses. I can afford to donate the 400 bucks to charity...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
How about a Stallman, Torvalds, and de Raadt lemon party?
"Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better."
They also represent a dieing phase of mobile-hardware evolution.
By the time OLPC positives coalesce, apps & data for the masses will all be ubiquitously net-available, meaning anything more than a terminal will be/is outdated.
Of course, the OLPC is still a viable tool for the left-behinds.
Were the day glow green color and, in the original specs, the hand crank. I wanted to take notes on my bright green notebook during one of those interminable sales demos, then right in the middle plug in my hand crank and charge up my laptop. Sorry, just charging up, go right on.
Then they took the hand crank out of the design and my whole sales demo interrupt fantasy just fell apart. But by that time I was already hooked on the idea of cheap laptop with built-in mesh networking.
I think I'd use the less powerful and more portable laptop more than a power brick that costs $3,000.00. If it linked in to my desktop when in range, all the better.
Too bad about the hand crank, though.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I may just be pulling the exact number out of my ass, but I thought it stopped being the $100 laptop and became the $175 laptop a while ago. Why are people still calling it the $100 laptop?
You might like some of the stuff these guys make, including a universal human powered charger for small gadgets. We have a couple of their things, the original crank and spring (clockwork) powered multiband radio, and a later, crank to generator model, excellent build quality there. The OLPC guys are still contemplating going with their foot pedal push generator thing, along with the yo yo string puller last I heard.
_If_ the notebook was really $100 then maybe I wouldn't be so cynical.
The only way to get one of these in the US is to participate in the Give One Get One program, where you buy 2 and give one away to help a child that would otherwise not receive an XO. It's a noble cause, but now you've upped the price for one (to the general public) from $100 to $400. We're still very far away from the realization of a $100 notebook, in my opinion.
See one of these XO notebooks next to a common Dell laptop. They are extremely smaller in size:
http://flickr.com/photos/barl0w/1101266148/
From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
OLPC espouses five core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and ***(5) free and open source.***
Someone else can run with option 5, to make an equivalent, for adults laptop. Depending on performance, we may finally see a machine mass-produced, showing acceptable speed and avertising that it's doing so despite "under-powered" hardware.
If this was mass-produced, people would finally have reason to question: why do I need this super-great/expensive machine for the latest OS? Sure we have plenty of tiny OSes out there, Puppy Linux, D*** Small Linux and various others from scratch. The problem is the same that kept Linux from the spotlight... it's not pre-installed on PCs sitting on store shelves.
(Sure the above efficiency question is asked frequently from one version of Windows to the next, but default installs of Linux flavors trying to be mainstream-ready are a bit slow on older hardware as well.)
I can't wait to see the results on the marketplace...
What's needed are some standard laptop cases, so components of standard sizes can be used to build systems. Use something like a PC-104 design with flat connectors, so you can choose whether to add a more powerful graphics card or something else. Have a DVD drive sized area where you can choose whether you need a DVD drive, more hard drives, more batteries. There obviously will be a need for several different sizes due to various portability-vs-power needs, but there can be more flexibility for machines...and more competition.
I find it ironic that the OLPC project is always regarded with such high praise, while any mention of a school district investing in laptops is always met with disdain and remarks such as "why does a kid need a laptop anyway? He'll just break it/lose it/trade it for drugs".
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Perhaps. But basic editing means you explain what acronyms are unless you are 100% confident you audience knows the term. Granted, I bet 90% of us do. But even when I first saw it, it did not jump to mind. It took a second or to.
I know that Slashdot prides itself on not filtering user submissions. But as long as Slashdot refers to its... its... ermmmm... people who hit the approve button as editors, they should be held to editorial standards.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
To me, sounds like they just went with tech-jargon-BS and said that the computer is the best way to move to a better education.
I must of missed it, can you show me where they say a computer is the best way to improve education?
If all the money they spent, and want to spend, on 3rd-world education went to just.. um... BOOKS, then they would have probably accomplished twice their goal by now.
Text books in the Third World are expensive, especially when they have to be replace yearly do to editing of corrections and updating them. With a net connection an e-book on a laptop these can easily, quickly, and cheaply. A child have even be able to carry a number of e-books on one XO, then when they finish one class the text used can be placed with new text. Then you can have not just one BOOK but a bunch of BOOKS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've had the notebook that I'm typing on right now for about 5 years. The battery's shot, but the power supply works (though patchworked with new wires) and the laptop itself still works fine. Sure, 500mhz won't play many games, but it works fine for going online.
I also have my other laptop from the late '90s. I've never lost or broke a laptop. So in my experience, it's 0% lost or broken.
"Your experience is statistically insignificant" - mutant from cut Futurama scene.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Why is he modded as troll? The summary says they're $100 and he's pointing out they're not, even in Uruguay. Look, he cites a source and everything.
In defense of the editors... the OLPC made the front page of Slashdot several times per month at least over the last year or more. Pretty sure you're the only one who hasn't heard of it.
Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better.
No. The more reason to drop the laptop fetish. Laptops absolutely have their appropriate uses- but desktops work just fine for a huge percentage of people. Their components are cheaper, more easily replaced, and usually superior in performance. Nevermind that forcing you to sit in front of the computer, as opposed to being available to you in bed, on your couch, on your porch, etc- means you're more prone to wasting more time on the internet.
Yet...very few people I know will even consider a desktop. It drives me insane in business settings- I can do all manner of repairs and data recovery very, very easily on a desktop. Laptops are a total mixed bag ranging from "the company will have a tech here tomorrow morning" to "ARRRRG its going to take an hour to get the damn thing apart."
Thinkpads and Dells are the best, from my experience; HP sells a lot of consumer-ish crap. Apple gets a failing grade in almost every regard; iBooks, Powerbooks, and Macbook Pros are MISERABLE to disassemble for hard drive replacement. iBooks require damn near COMPLETE disassembly to get to the drive. The only plus is firewire target disk mode, but that is near useless in case of hardware failure.
Please help metamoderate.
I find it ironic that the OLPC project is always regarded with such high praise, while any mention of a school district investing in laptops is always met with disdain and remarks such as "why does a kid need a laptop anyway?
More and more colleges are requiring laptops. Some even require a specific brand or model with a specific OS, usually Windows. Some colleges include a laptop in the tuition, others require students to get one themselves.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
My local LUG is having a large conference tomorrow, where one of the highlights is an introduction to programming on the OLPC.
At least in Argentina, where a deployment is being scheduled, the entire Free Software community has the hots for this. Whether it succeeds or not as en educational tool, it's pioneering a new paradigm of computing; the truly small, truly cheap, truly rugged laptop.
It's a pretty safe assumption that all of slashdot readers know what OLPC means. This is after all news site for geeks at heart and it's not the 1st time we've heard about it here. If you fail to understand it, just read the article is that too much to ask?
If I want RIAA, ISP, RAM, OLPC, etc. to be spelled out for me I'd go read news sites geared toward the general public.
Here's something that might interest those who are thinking about the $400 two-fer, but want to play with XO first...
You can emulate most of it with qemu or vmware. It's easy.
See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start
Seemed a pretty sluggish on my wimpy Core Duo 1.66, but lots of that may be due to a lack of hardware accelerated video in qemu.
Anyhow, check it out. Good times.
(It does seem odd to use Python as the primary language on a slow CPU with little memory, but it seems to work okay...)
I call bullshit.
First, if you go about recommending peoeple build their game rigs around macs, I hope they have the sense to tell you you're talking shit. Video editing - maybe, and picassa looks exactly the same on windows and mac, which is what most people nowadays are happy to use rather than face Photoshop's steep learning-curve and/or price.
Second, I too am a sysadmin, and I too use my lappie for things that can be done by a 700MHz P3 like RDP and SSH.
HOWEVER, and this is where you're off the mark by a mile, the big difference between a P3 and the L7500 Core2Duo I'm writing this on now is the fact that the latter consumes WAY LESS power, and offers me insane (by P3 standards) battery life (Thinkpad X60t, before you ask).
Your computer needs don't sum up with the CPU&GPU either. Last year I was laptopless and cashless for a while, and borrowed a Dell lappie from work for several months. Let me tell you something. You won't get work done on 800x600, and my recent move to an SXGA+ (1400*1050) screen DID make a hell of a lot of difference in my ability to get shit done. These won't come standard on Asus EeePC, nor will you find them on entry-level laptop machines.
You're right in that CPU SPEED is not a factor. You're wrong that for someone who wants to do non-CPU-intensive stuff like office work or internet browsing needs the dirt-cheapest lappie he can find. His parameters are different, yes, but they're not non-existent.
And I haven't even mentioned a word about *carrying* (for those that actually take their machine with them) around a frigging battle cruiser, which is what cheap typically amounts to.
-
The wireless mesh networking capability will be awesome! I'm in the US, if all my neighbors had wireless mesh networking, low power, and open then there would always be a network connection available. It would also be free. The users would create their own internet.
Could probably sell thousands per year as rugged, portable laptops for field service techs.
Why are they using x86? ARM or SHx are both much more power efficient, work with linux (and get more done per clock cycle). Did AMD give them a good deal on low end chips they couldn't get rid of?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Most people use the web, send email, and word process. I know it's common in Slashdot to talk about your week-long 3D rendering sessions, but the number of people who do that is extremely small. Seriously, I spent some years visiting houses and fixing computers and maybe one person in all those people did stuff with video. I told him to upgrade his RAM from 256 to 512. The point is that one of these basic laptops is ideal for what people really do with their computers, and hardware bloat is just as serious as software bloat (because it makes irrational demands on batteries and heat disposal). Hell, 99% of what I do with a PC can be done on an OLPC. On a related note, Vista was created mostly to give Americans a distorted picture of the hardware they needed to live out their pathetic computational lives, lives that would be satisfied on a Pentium MMX running Windows 98.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Macbook Pros are MISERABLE to disassemble for hard drive replacement.
Translation: you've never actually seen one.
But now it is suppose to be using a pull string.
"Go right ahead sir, I'm just charging my computer", as you stand
up and pretend to be pull starting a chainsaw.
or tie a little handle on the end of it and pretend you are at
the gym during the sales pitch.
I think there is still hope for this machine
I've seen very few textbooks released in e-book format; most of the ones I have seen were in very specialized subjects and released under the GNU FDL. I doubt that textbook publishing companies will jump at the chance to release e-book versions of up-to-date, popular textbooks, undercut their own profits, and put themselves in the same position as the RIAA with regards to piracy, regardless of how much it benefits impoverished children. Even pharmaceutical companies jealously guard their IP when it comes to having low-cost generics manufactured overseas, and in that case there are lives at stake.
On the other hand, publishers might release e-book versions of textbooks a generation or two old at a low price - that could help deal with the problem of piracy by consumers in the first world (since many courses, particularly in college, require the latest edition), and selling some e-books at a reduced price would be better than selling nothing at a high price for both parties involved.
I figured that the lesson learned from the $100 laptop was how to get other of people to pay for your commercial R&D while praising you for being a humanitarian by claiming that your product will be much cheaper than is realistic, claiming that you are doing if for charity, and maybe selling a few thousand at cost when you get it far enough along to be manufactured.
This project is a scam. If the goal is to teach kids about computers, there are much cheaper, and far more durable ways to do it. I can't find it know, but when the "$100" PC was first announced, I went out and priced what it would cost to build a PC based around a C64 as a core, and I could get the parts RETAIL in single unit prices for ~$90. The only thing that was not included was the wireless networking, but it did include the hand crank, as the DTV (C64) runs off of 4 AA batteries. It shouldn't be that hard to generate 6 volts with a hand crank.
No. The more reason to drop the laptop fetish. Laptops absolutely have their appropriate uses- but desktops work just fine for a huge percentage of people. Their components are cheaper, more easily replaced, and usually superior in performance. Nevermind that forcing you to sit in front of the computer, as opposed to being available to you in bed, on your couch, on your porch, etc- means you're more prone to wasting more time on the internet.
I used think along those lines before I got my first Thinkpad. While I still sit and work at a proper desk, I prefer doing everything possible on the laptop. The keyboard is better, no reaching for the mouse (for the click-and-point stuff), the noise doesn't get any lower, and the compact size allows me to to use my desk for "real-world" things, not to mention I can look out the window without having to turn my head. And, if needed, I can get up and take it elsewhere.
I think your objections have everything to do with the cost and engineering involved in making something so small so that it can function like a larger machine -- higher priced parts makes for higher price replacement parts, for example. That people tend more and more to prefer laptops (for whatever reason) should be expected. As for the goals of the OLPC project, the traditional desktop/keyboard/monitor approach is out of the question.
I have now seen a load of comments along the lines of "you can get a cheap Walmart laptop for $400" and it's so much better.
No, it is not better. It does have more RAM, a faster CPU and a larger disk. However, it does not have a 24 hour battery life, the ability to run without a mains supply, a rugged design that will allow it to last a long time in a tough environment or a screen which will work in direct sunlight. It also doesn't generare oits of heat, so it doesn't need one of those awful laptop CPU fans which are so unreliable on low end machines.
So yeah, you get lower speed specs, but you get other much higher specs instead. And it's still 1/4 of the price or 1/3 or whatever the price ends up being.
So, no that $400 Dell is not even nearly equivalent. Come to think of it that $4000 Dell isn't equivalent either. Something with that portability, ruggedness and battery life would be vastly more useful to a lot of people than a high end, high power, fragile and very expensive computer.
Remember, a computer is more than just the CPU speed.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's interesting to note that the XO is diskless. The idea of putting the OS on a solid state device is catching on. If the XO allowed a USB-like boot, I think that would be even more useful. A number of distros support just this type of boot (see for example http://www.mandriva.com/ or http://www.faunos.com/ ). Here's an article from the second of those distros that argues why its useful for the user to be able to physically detach the memory device (USB) from the rest of the computing hardware: http://www.faunos.com/articles/article-01.html
Text books in the Third World are expensive, especially when they have to be replace yearly do to editing of corrections and updating them.
I don't think you see how basic the need is in the third world. The need is huge for very basic skills in reading and algebra. Those books don't have to be updated at all.
You can buy more than 100 books for the $100 of a single OLPC, providing reading material for an entire school.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
I've been complaining about the name for a while now.
The purpose of the project is to change the learning model of disadvantaged children via novel purpose-built and Free software and revolutionary hardware (mesh computing, heaps of work done on the power side of things).
So then they call it "one laptop per child" and the tech media starts comparing it to PC laptops that people use for entirely different purposes. The casual observer / tech writer goes "laptops... like word processing and games and stuff? 3rd world children don't need that, they need food and infrastructure!".
Also it's been tagged "the $100 laptop", which once again causes people to compare it to consumer laptops and start whining when the price estimate changes.
So yeah - almost all of the writing I read about this wonderful technology Completely Misses The Point, stemming from a terrible choice of name.
i wouldn't worry about publishers. i'd bet there's more than enough people willing to contribute with that part of the project (especially people already involved in education) and, even if they weren't, the governments there have more than enough incentive to promote it. they are already expending millions into this project so expending a comparatively very small amount on generating the contents is more than justified.
I agree with all your other points. However, here are additional things I find wrong with laptops:
- battery life
- fragile
- they get really freakin hot
- any external peripherals are a pain
- easily stolen or lost
My laptop has its uses, but it's not my "base". It's not my workstation where I keep all of my "important documents". It's definitely not as comfortable or ergonomic as a natural keyboard at a proper desk, and I'm not going to kill my eyesight looking at a small screen all the time.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I've seen very few textbooks released in e-book format; most of the ones I have seen were in very specialized subjects and released under the GNU FDL.
Do you live in the Third World? They are most useful there, however they are used elsewhere. U Penn list more than 25,000 e-books. The University of Texas lists more. Those are just the first 2 results of a Google of e-books "text books", which lists almost 25,000 results. Of the XO ZDNet" has this to say:
"Assuming this device can survive its harsh environment and continue to function over a period of a half-dozen or more years (still a stretch, in my estimation), a single lightweight (but rugged) device, could easily outlast 100 textbooks in a hot and humid environment. And, by any measure, a $100 laptop equipped with 100 electronic textbooks could be worth its weight in gold in such a third-world setting."
FalconShould there be a Law?
Virtually all academic subjects, all the way up to college and even much of the graduate level, were laid out decades if not hundreds of years ago. The cycle of expensive textbook replacement and revisioning is an appalling money-making scam perpetuated by the publishing industry, not unlike the tactics of a certain Northwestern U.S. software company and their operating system upgrade paths.
Proper books stick around for many many years, enriching the lives of generations of children and adults alike. They're tangible and permanent and don't require patches and they don't get pwned and there's no such thing as a book virus*. They don't get cracked screens or memory errors or head crashes or burned out fan motors. They can be viewed from all angles and don't take 5 minutes to boot up, navigate the filesystem, and launch a document viewer...just find that passage you remember reading last week. Laptops and internet connections and ebooks and proprietary file formats are unreliable and fragile systems built upon complex frameworks on top of sketchy dependencies, and they are not now nor will they ever be as effective or efficient as simple words and pictures printed on paper, covered and bound, for anyone to pick up and read.
If Ramanujan had a laptop, he would have used the backlit screen to illuminate his outdated textbook and slate board.
And yes, as a matter of fact, I do work in a university library and I do resent the fact that it's slowly being converted into a 6-floor internet cafe, with our stacks being systematically transferred to the "collections depository" (read: storage warehouse) across campus. And I'm not even a crusty old library curmudgeon. I'm a 29-year-old UNIX admin.
*Maybe a bookworm, but I would deserve to be punished for that kind of language abuse.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
i'd say i learnt 50% of what i know about pc's and technology in general on equipment that is still out there and working today, and that can be had for $50 or less.
3rd world kids don't need a fancy new fucking laptop.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
First off, i'm pretty sure the mac mafia gave you the troll score for suggesting that OSX is less than the best gaming platform out there.
Now, about your arguments: there is a huge shift underway in portable computing. For $400 you're no longer stuck with a coal-burning, memory-poor load of bricks. So my current configuration features a Core 2 duo desktop with a pair of flat panels; it cost far more than $400, but I use it for all kinds of "heavy lifting". For the rest, I have my n800(just over $400 with memory and keyboard). It's still rough around the edges, but it gets the job done: I check mail, slashdot, listen to music, walk around the house talking on VoIP, and not have to worry about battery life. My second device doesn't need to replace my first. In fact, it's more useful to me if it doesn't.
Your post exemplifies the old thinking on portable computing: power, size, low price: pick one, and suffer the others. Now we're starting to see machines that can give you the last two in exchange for small screens and modest processors. Hey, if you're not running Windows, you can get by with a lot less.
The obvious choice is ... well ... obvious, and I'm sure it would bring the sales pitch to a 'grinding' halt if you did start cranking ;)
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
I love this video for how good it shows how little has actually changed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cxbstn2IZM
Sure that one doesn't cover web usage, but without stupid Flash it would probably do decent in that area aswell.. Some more ram usage and so on is ok but the current rate and state are ridiculous.
I've used claris works on mac classics and LC IIs myself and I prefered it to works on win 3.11 on the 386s, and for most peoples use it would be sufficient today aswell..
Text books in the Third World are expensive, especially when they have to be replace yearly do to editing of corrections and updating them.
I don't think you see how basic the need is in the third world. The need is huge for very basic skills in reading and algebra. Those books don't have to be updated at all.
I hope you don't mean all they need in the Third World is to add, subtract, and read.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Virtually all academic subjects, all the way up to college and even much of the graduate level, were laid out decades if not hundreds of years ago.
That may be true for English textbooks but it's definitely not true for books in Swahili, Hausa, or many other languages. And the places where these languages are spoken is where the XO can help the most. What you're saying shows a typical Eurocentric attitude.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Just about anything you keep on a shared server is liable to discovery and use in all sorts of law suits. Particularly in law suits between your service provider and others. This can get you into all sorts of legal problems; for example ripping a CD is legal, but ripping it and storing it on someone else's machine is not. Nasty comments you make about others will be private opinions in your own diary and libel if published. Keeping data on other people's systems is something you should be really careful about it.
A few bad lawsuits and the whole web applications for personal use industry may go down completely.
ignore the fucktard who says "they need it for hs/college" The point of this is self-determined learning. Ideally, this will be a tool for kids to self-teach literacy. Once they've achieved literacy, an entire world of learning is now opened up.
... why? Because they're illiterate. And that's in a fairly well educated part of the third world. When your entire education is hunting, farming, warfare and oral history, your horizons are limited. Your access to education is limited to your village. However, if you learn to read, you break that lock. If you can read, you have a chance to learn more then is on the radio (assuming you have a radio). If you can read and share books, you can spread information through the world.
If you haven't been there, you have no idea how pervasive illiteracy. Al Quaeda's torture manual is a picture book
That's the point of the OLPC.
My wife's (yeah, I know, I don't belong here) experience with mandatory laptops in high school is that it's taken away the last pretense of caring about education.
When I go into work, the first thing that I do is move the keyboard and monitor of my much more capable desktop out of the way, so that I have room for my small laptop. Curiously, the small keyboard of the laptop has turned out to be much more ergonomic than a full-sized desktop keyboard, and I can get a much better working position with the laptop than with the unnatural fixed position forced by the hulking desktop. Indeed, before I got the laptop I had suffered from severe tendonitis in my wrists for many years, and this vanished as soon as I moved to the laptop, and hasn't come back. The argument about heat is also bogus, as far as I am concerned, and related to the fact that most people buy the biggest, overpowered laptop that they can find, and then complain that it gets hot. I bought a late Pentium M laptop last year, and it runs cool all of the time, without the fan coming on most of the time, because unless I am running something heavy, the CPU automatically throttles down from 1.9GHz to just 800MHz. Returning to the slashdot article, of course the OLPC won't ever get hot if it only consumes 2W.
You may not have noticed, but the US dollar has lost lots of value in the last two or three years. So the cost in US$ has gone up a lot.
But three years ago, this thing could have been announced as a "150 Euro laptop" and today that would be spot on.
If these laptops are so cheap, and available to everyone, people won't mind buying them in massive amounts.
This will generate a huge heap of trash.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Having a black-white high DPI mode, readable outside, is quite a useful innovative feature, in my book, with the low power consumption the laptop can be used as an e-book reader.
I wonder if laptops makers will license the display and scale it to 14" to sell in regular laptops? Probably not though as they're doing very little innovation.
Of course having a great product is not enough to be a great success..
So the biggest problem with it is this: kids in the third world don't have a lot and the concept of sharing is widely-practiced - ONE LAPTOP PER CLASS is plenty! Why OLPC is intent on giving EVERY child a laptop is indeed, very misguided and just reflects US consumerist values.
www.itjerk.com
Please try to pay attention...
No sig today...
Please try to keep up with the project.
No sig today...
The point of the laptop ISN'T to teach about computers.
The XO is meant to replace textbooks. The $100 came from a printing estimate for textbooks over five years, not some grand marketing scheme, and they will hit that, and cheaper, over time. It's also to be more interactive than, say, a text book or even a chalkboard.
The Etoys interface is meant to allow kids to model things like gravity, ecosystems, inclined planes and so on, without needing a lot of adult intervention.
The guys involved have devoted substantial portions of their lives to education. But every genius on Slashdot figures they could do the project better after reading an article. (And probably not even all of that.) And certainly not bothering to read the OLPC website which addresses the issues that come up here time and time again, including the "send them used equipment"
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_mission
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_technology
20 years ago I saw some strange people talking into these things the size of breezeblocks anw we all thought it was just perverse.
We have call-boxes and phones in houses.
Now the current generation genuinely think differently
When they call someone they automatically call that persons mobile
when they buy a house they do not have a landline, they have broadband
when they go out they do not meet at the kings head at 9 and stay there, they meet in the west end at some approximate time and move about. They do not necessarially need to be physically there, some will participate via text and if you ask later you will be told that X was there that night even if he/she was not physically there
There are many similarities between desktops and fixed-base phones :- why do I need to do use it here at this specific desk in this building? Why is the storage in this PC? Why are the apps there and not where I am?
Citrix/ Thin Clients/ NAS/ Sans are all things that move us towards the place where the desktop no longer exists, the resource is where I am, wherever I am.
This means laptops - and if I am paying, cheap ones.
It's $399, and for that kind of money I can buy a crappy-ass DELL that at least works.
No, but they need to be able to add, subtract and read, have drinkable water, generic drugs against endemic diseases, ensured food supplies and stable environment before they have the luxury of worryting about IT skills and ebooks. Or the OPLC is going to wind up lying on ground next to a dying, illiterate child. In a continent racked by child soldiers, out of control HIV and famine, what use is "mesh networking"?
You're judging a computer solely based upon how easy it is to disassemble?
I think you need to step back, and remember that IT works for the company. The company does not work for the IT department. If the boss wants the laptop, then he's damn well going to get a laptop. Unless you have a better excuse than "It occasionally makes my job a pain", he's got the upper hand.
I will agree that Thinkpads are very nice. With a few minor exceptions, they're easy to disassemble. They're ridiculously durable, and generally tend to be pretty reliable. All this comes at a cost of course, and Thinkpads tend to be hellishly expensive, especially if you want something particularly fast or lightweight.
Apple's got the laptop thing figured out pretty well. Their machines are generally fitted with the Intel's top-of-the-line-without-being-extravagant chips, have decent specs, are lightweight and durable (even on the low-end models), and are really quite inexpensive when you consider the value for the money. They seem to have addressed the hard-drive replacement concerns, and the drives on the new MacBooks are much easier to access (I'll agree that the older iBooks were indeed awful to disassemble).
But Dell..... Dell's laptops have been awful for a few years now. For the most part, they haven't significantly evolved past the C-Series chassis that they were using since the 90s. Pick up a dell laptop with one hand -- it'll weigh 6 pounds, feel flimsy, and in many cases, you'll actually hear the chassis start to creak and bend. Now do the same with a Thinkpad or MacBook. Now, decide which of the three is least likely to survive being dropped from 4 feet up.
I suppose that the ability to remove the hard drive, and also completely break the machine apart into a million pieces with minimal effort could be considered a selling point, but it's not very high up on my list.
There was a point in time when the expandability of an ATX desktop was considerably superior to a laptop or a proprietary desktop. Considering that technology has become relatively stable, along with the advent of USB and Firewire, the need for an expandable system is pretty much negated. Unless you count gamers, and anyone else who has the serious need to do massive amounts of number-crunching, most people are adequately served by a laptop.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
But basic editing means [...] It took a second or to.
Right.
-b
myselfmusic
Nice article. Overall a pretty good summary of the new features of the OLPC laptop. One feature however is missing (and missing from most stories about the OLPC laptop), and that is the collaboration model and the corresponding user interface. Probably we are so used to the clunky ways we do collaboration on our PC's that we completely mis the revolutionary aspects of this new sharing model and the user interface that makes sharing the easiest thing in the world to do. It is build into the software, just a mouse click to share your document with your friends (visualized on the screen). No big iron groupware servers, just one mechanism for sharing instead of the dozens of primitive and incompatible methods we use now. I hope that this aspect of the laptop will get more attention. And maybe the open source community cab develop this in to a new killer app for Linux.
This laptop isn't just a computer, is also acts as a book. Unless you change 'One Laptop Per Child' to 'One laptop per child and a projector and a serious source of power' this is not going to work.
It's very likely it'll be one laptop per 2 or 3 children in reality, because those nations *are* that poor, but that's still cheaper and more flexible than books. I prefer books to read, but they're a precious and costly resource. With the laptops there is much more flexibility in delivering content.
BTW, there IS a problem with OLPC but it's less obvious. Approx 60% of kids have eye deficiencies and require glasses to read. Someone in the Netherlands has sorted that problem but I'm going to see how I can help them get that to the market (to set up production costs more than the glasses - it's a fantastically clever idea).
Staw poll: would you agree to buy a set of glasses if it means 4 kids in those countries could get one for free? If so, what would you be prepared to pay for them (they look cool, by the way, but I can't tell you more than that yet).
Insert
Reminds me of the Nicklaus Wirth work years ago when his group was designing 50 W workstations.
to hold and make operational a computer that is far less powerful than any lapop being built today, including the OLPC.
Tomorrow you will have throw away laptops. just as today you have throw away calculators.
The point is, with or without the OLPC and competitive efforts along the same line, $100 laptops and even sub $100 laptops will happen.
The question is timing. When they do happen will it be to help fill a poor countries needs or post poor?
To me poor is qualified as having need of something more vital to survival such as food, clothing, shelter, medicine, basic education, etc... then it is to spend it on a computer.
And when the income raises enough to buy such a computer, how is what such a computer is capable of, going to benefit someone living in such a poor environment.
Just at what level of poor does such a computer become viable to have?
Before that level is reached I can understand having a common share of computers, such as like books recycled in a class room, own by the school...? etc...
One unfortunate lesson that the OLPC team should have learned is that you shouldn't promise a $100 laptop unless you're sure that you can DELIVER a $100 laptop. Now that it costs twice as much as originally promised, many of the third world countries who were wanted to buy OLPC's aren't interested anymore and are looking at alternatives from other hardware manufacturers.
I know that's a tough lesson to learn, but it is the unfortunate truth.
mod parent up
The equivalent of an Asus EEE running DR-DOS, a pimped GEOS, WordPro, Lotus 123, PINE and some ancient version of Corel Draw will do 90% of your standard desktop work at a speed one hasn't even dreamed of. It's because nowadays we run upwards of 5-7 extreme performance hogs at a time on regular PCs today without even thinking twice about it. Decoding MP3s, millions of desktop colors, workplace shells chewing so much RAM and CPU it's insane, running huge apps on top of Java, Mozilla/XUL, .Net or toolkits of simular performance impact, with the odd webserver, database and somewhere around three net-applets (Mail, PIM, Newsreader, Browser) idling in the background. The ease at which we switch around between 10-20 pratically redundant application stacks running at a time is payed for by throwing huge amounts of computing power at them. Optimze that even slightly and you'll have a huge impact on what a work enviroment needs.
... There really is no need to do that, but we like it that way. Thus anything slower than 800Mhz often is out of discussion.
It's just that today we expect a comp to idle an active mp3 player while running Firefox showing a Flash Video in 600x300 at 25fps. With Eclipse and OpenOffice open in the background. All powered by 32bit Aqua or an MS rippoff.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Obligatory: Slashdot has editors??
"Programming is the fine art of making a machine that has absolutely no intelligence act as though it does."
I think you need to step back, and remember that IT works for the company. The company does not work for the IT department.
You need to stop lecturing people with more IT experience than you, kid. We don't just sit around waiting for your beck and call; we've got shit to do, too. Our time costs the company just like your time does. Furthermore, time spent fixing your laptop that could have been avoided with giving you a desktop, means we couldn't spend time on other things that could have helped the company make money. We Big Boys refer to that sort of thing as 'opportunity cost'.
Second: everything about laptops are more expensive for employers. They're far more easily damaged (and the resulting lost employee productivity waiting for it to be fixed, time devoted to it by IT staff, etc.), less upgradeable (which means it isn't as useful as a capital expenditure), much more easily stolen (and the resulting loss of trade secrets, lost employee productivity, etc.)
A good chunk of the people who claim they need a laptop to 'do work at home' don't do a drop of work at home...it's just so they get a nice 'home computer' out of their employer.
Please help metamoderate.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
That's assuming the C64 was powerful enough to handle the networking facilities, which it probably isn't. Shifting the processing burden onto the networking hardware might solve the problem... and it would significantly increase the cost. Let's see your "$90" C64 PC then. but it did include the hand crank, as the DTV (C64) runs off of 4 AA batteries. Yes, and I can buy a little dinky toy with an old-school monochrome LED toy that meets the technical definition of a "computer" which probably requires even less power. The fact that it would be woefully underpowered for the intended use seems to be irrelevant to this discussion.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
But consider that with, say, 5,000 of these laptops a teacher has the ability to write course material and disperse it to all of the laptops and beyond to the rest of the world. If the e-texts aren't currently available it would just take one ambitious teacher to solve the problem. Then consider how many teachers will want to produce their own teaching materials once they see how widely they could be used.
"Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better."
I've never had a notebook "get lost", but I guess if they become cheap enough people will lose them more often as they'll be less careful with them. But if a notebook does "get lost", the price of the hardware is the least of your concerns. The data that's on the notebook falling into the wrong hands is a much greater concern, and that has no relation to the price of the computer.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Okay. If we're going to start nitpicking...
My last job (I'm currently a full-time student) was as an IT guy in a 40% Mac, 60% PC shop.
The Macs definitely cost us less to maintain per machine, simply because we never had to remove spyware from them.
If a mac came in with a hardware problem, it was more often than not covered under our support agreement with Apple, and we'd box it up and ship it out at Apple's expense. If it was an urgent matter requiring a turnaround of more than the 2 or 3 days it took to do a depot repair, we'd lend them a spare. When buying in bulk, the support contracts are usually cheap enough to be "definitely worth it".
Sure, it's probably not optimal, and I suppose that it's not great for our job security either, but it also never really bothered anybody.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Considering that technology has become relatively stable, along with the advent of USB and Firewire, the need for an expandable system is pretty much negated.
So in your world, every time you need a new feature, or more storage or a different kind of drive on your system, you drape another cord-attached dongle across your desk.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
I'd rather back up! Duh!
Or just leave everything on network storage, and use the laptop as a dumb terminal!
It's not rocket surgery, people!
(Well, ok, it might be for Joe User...)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Over the nearly 30 years of computing I've done Ive found many of those things (video digital image work, etc) don really need power but if you don't have power you need patience (instead of rendering transitions of video in real time you wait five minutes, etc.)
And back when I had more novice enthusiasm and a lot less money to spare I would wait all that extra time for programs to do their things, and the results were just as spectacular on a much more expensive but faster box.
The myth that last years computers are just usable as word processors is just a myth. Same goes for the OLPC and other lower powered PCs. For kids (like me, years back) it's just the opportunity to try cool things on a computer that make up any speed issues.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
That works just as well the other way around. Desktops have their appropriate uses, but laptops work just fine for a huge percentage of people.
Well, the company paid for my laptop, so "cheaper" doesn't matter to me -- or to other people, in a similar situation.
My desktop recently died. It was likely either the CPU or the motherboard, but I figured I should probably replace both, since new CPUs are cheap -- like $60 for a new dual-core 64-bit. This was made even less of an issue by my friend, who was looking to upgrade his CPU, so he gave me his old one -- so it made even more sense just to rip the motherboard and replace.
But the new motherboard was DDR2 only, and I had DDR400 in the old machine.
Thus, I ended up replacing CPU, motherboard, and RAM. I think I might've kept the same PSU, and also video card, power supply, case, monitor, and hard drives.
However, if you add it all up... It's an old video card. I could probably buy a newer, faster one for less than $100.
Hard drives are about the most replaceable things on laptops. Power supplies are cheap. So about the only real loss to buying a new laptop, versus the upgrade I made to my desktop, was not being able to upgrade the computer without upgrading the monitor.
Realistically, most people don't do it that way. New desktops are generally cheaper whole, and by the time something dies, or you just feel like you want an upgrade, pretty much everything in that box is going to be obsolete, to the point you'll want to replace it.
So, I like having my options open, yes. But the modularity inside the case is generally irrelevant, to most people.
And less able to.
Why is that a good thing?
This can also range from a serious problem to a minor nuisance to a huge problem, depending on whether IT is done right at your company.
Ours basically outsources IT. Basically, all the stuff that's actually irreplaceable on my laptop is stored somewhere else. My code is on a server somewhere, my email and documents are on another. I can still work on my own, since the code is checked out on my hard drive, but so long as I remember to check in regularly, all the data is safe.
I also have a disk image of my hard drive in its first usable state, since it was a pain to get drivers, etc working in XP. It took me less than half an hour to get Linux working, including waiting for the installer.
What this means is, if my laptop was stolen tomorrow, they'd get no confidential information (that's all encrypted), and I'd be up and running again in maybe an hour or two with a new laptop, provided it was available.
If it actually died, I could send it back to the manufacturer, let them take their time trying to recover (it's likely under warranty), while I sit comfortably working with a new laptop. Once the old one is properly repaired, it can become the spare.
And if it means a pain in the ass for you, so what? You're on the clock. Unless the vast majority of your time is spent doing nothing until there's a problem, this shouldn't even annoy you -- really, is there some other aspect of IT you'd rather be doing than disassembling a laptop?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You must be new here.
I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet.
BitFrost (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost) is the set of security mechanisms present in the OLPC.
Though I certainly wouldn't care to summarize the entire thing, here's what it comes down to.
User programs don't automatically get the running user's full rights. A calculator has no reason to delete your documents, so why should it be able to? And without your knowledge to boot. On the OLPCs, documents are kept in a special storage area. It isn't a matter of owner read access. In general, for a program to get a user's file poofed in to its chroot sandbox, it has to ask the document service (which presents a consistent dialog). Further, a text editor doesn't need to access the network. The user can access the network, but his or her programs can only do so if explicitly allowed to (various such rights are set at install time, configurable later). Certain combinations of program rights are disallowed at install time (such as both network access and webcam access) but can be enabled later. Plus a lot more.
Sudo/UAC sound nice and all until you realize that programs and users are separate entities.
Yes, there's a lot to learn from the OLPC project. It's designed to be used (safely) by computer-illiterate children who can't (or can scarcely) read. If you think that sounds like a good description of computer users in general, then you're absolutely right. Security as seen in *nix and Windows makes perfect sense for protecting users from each other. That was the goal back in the day. The people with access to a server were supposed to have a general idea of what they were doing (entirely on them if they didn't), and in that case *nix security works well. But computers have gotten more personal, and that assumption is now blatantly false. Anyone thinkng that Windows security problems stop at buffer overflows, or that Linux on the desktop will change anything, is a fool.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
$200 buys a kid one -- see laptop.org. Pretty nice gesture IMHO. Personally I've already got a laptop so if I was gonna spend another $200, instead of getting myself one, I'd just buy one for an additional child.
:)
Any implication that the OLTP gang would just cluelessly hand out the laptops where there are cultural, infrastructure, or other impediments to their good use is, well, clueless. The OLTP folks are far more versed in the realities in the field, in each country that will get laptops, than some arm-chair critic. This is true of most NGOs. They work with locals, and they know what's going on, and they know how to get the best possible results under the circumstances. They care. People who don't care don't go to work for them, because the NGOs count on that caring to get workers who will settle for lower pay than their skill set would command working for industry. This frees up money to apply to their cause which -- guess what? -- they really care about.
It's interesting how people project their own lack of understanding onto others. I see this all the time, especially when I compare the depth of understanding that functionaries in the government of the USA have with the amateurs who criticize policy. Policy is sometimes a step in the wrong direction and the peanut gallery is occasionally correct, but generally the professionals have a perspective that's a thousand times deeper than the I-read-it-in-the-newspaper crowd. Compare the understanding of computers that a professional programmer or net admin has with that of the average user; now admit that the same spread of understanding exists in every other field too. Yeah, even in climate science!
One laptop plus one external display is a dual monitor setup. One laptop plus a dual monitor setup is a triple monitor setup. I've got a keyboard, mouse, external screen, external speakers, and external backup hard drive connected to my laptop when it's on its desk, so I get the best of both worlds. Plus, the battery works as a poor man's UPS. The lights flicker and the network drops, but my computer keeps going.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Re: the lesson is: you probably don't need a laptop
No one device does it all. My basketball buddies said get a cell so we can call you for a game. My $10/20 minutes a month cell phone keeps me connected to the outside world 24/7/31. Perfect.
As an adult student, I need 8 hrs of power, wi-fi/internet, usb, web cam, linux, 7" screen, standard international keyboard and I submit a child would need no less - and all available within the OLPC laptop. Perfection.
All students of the world need to work independenly and collectively in all sorts of environments and hours of the clock. All students of the world need light (a candle) or in this case power for their laptop. Today's world rejects typewriter noise in most environments even though they can operate in the dark without power!
wifi/internet: Dictionaries, news and other learning resources are either too heavy (book format), too expensive or unavailable locally except throught the internet 24/7/365.
USB: is a nice easy standard to memory sticks sticks, hard dives and
standard keyboards at perfect height.
webcam: is the gateway to carrying your reference books and text books (digital photos) in a memory stick and avoiding expensive library (if available) photocopy fees.
CPU speed: Not an issue. I can type way faster than I can learn.
Linux: Safe. No hidden code.
Thanks, OLPC.
This project is a scam.
I don't say this very often, but: Fuck you.
If you actually read the OLPC web pages and actually find out why they made the choices they made, you might reconsider your position. But you don't know anything and yet here you are, shooting off your mouth.
Unless you are really just trolling. In which case: Fuck you.
Well, there IS a jargon file. Maybe slashdot can have a jargon DB, queryingable and all...
add bells and all's
Tomorrow is another day...
Translation: you've never actually seen one.
Have you? Instructions here for the Macbook Pro.
Short:
You have to remove the battery, the ram, no less than 23 screws, keyboard and trackpad, and bluetooth module to get the harddrive.
He's being modded troll because the moderator (probably) assumed that the vast majority of the Slashdot readership already knew that the device actually costs more than $100. Were that true for all Slashdot users, then saying "Hey, it costs more than $100!" would be restating known point to emphasize the negative evocation of that point, which would be...
trolling.
I'm not saying that the moderator was right to make such assumptions, but that is the apparent answer to your question.
In any case, the post should have been modded down for redundancy.
Thinkpads really aren't all that expensive anymore. Some users report that the quality is worse since it was sold to Lenovo, but I was just able to order a x61s with a top-end low voltage dual-core (L7500) and an LED screen for less than $900.
I pwn this comment. "The Fine Print" says so.