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.'"

Comments

Re:How do you get one of these?

[larry bagina]

You can buy two for $400 starting november 12th. One for you, one is donated to a 3rd world kid.

here ya go

[zogger]

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.

Re:How do you get one of these?

[arth1]

Correction: One is donated, if, and only if at least 5,000 people sign up for the deal.

Without any other committing statements contradicting this, I take it to mean that if 3,000 people sign up, they'll send out 3,000 very overpriced XO's to those who order, and the poor kids get no machines.

And no mention about who is going to pay for the infrastructure needed for the machines either, if they reach the 5,000 goal. Not only do they need a support apparatus, but the machines themselves need electricity (the crank never came out, and the other battery charging implements are still not in production, if they ever will be) and Internet (the applications on the XO are leased and have to be renewed over Internet every so often). Just handing out machines like it was bread won't do people any good.

Re:Crank it up

[GTMoogle]

It's intended to be able to charge other things through usb.

And the pullstring is better than a crank because you can put your foot through it and just keep tapping while you work.

OLPC system images

[snark23]

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...)

Re:Serious question:

[evilviper]

ARM or SHx are both much more power efficient, work with linux (and get more done per clock cycle)

NO, YES, and NO respectively.

ARM and SH are both very low power, but that is entirely at the expense of performance. A good trade-off for embedded systems that don't need much processing power, but certainly not for multimedia applications. As soon as you start trying to do floating point calculations, watch your ARM/SH CPU grind to a halt. They certainly do less per clock than even older x86 CPUs, and are a long way behind fairly modern x86 CPUs like the Geode. That goes double for Intel's clock-inflated XScale CPUs, pushing 1GHz.

Re:Maybe they should have patented it all

[TheRaven64]

Their actual plan is almost the exact opposite of this. By making all of the source code and designs available under a permissive license, they hope other people will start building them. If your country getting good use out of OLPC units? Build a factory to produce any new ones you need, employ local people, and get a workforce that's trained in laptop assembly, educational software development, and so on.