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Negroponte vs Intel
Yogi_Stewart_4 writes "More OLPC/Intel love — apparently Intel used 'underhanded' tactics to try to block sales' contracts of the OLPC, trying to reach the customer directly after an agreement had been reached.
"They would go in even after we had signed contracts and try to persuade government officials to scrap their contract and sign a contract with them instead. That's not a partnership."
Mr Negroponte cited an example in Peru where Intel sales staff tried to persuade the country's vice-minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, to buy the Intel Classmate PC."
IF targeting the 3rd world, the classmate sucks:
a) There are cooling holes on it! Hello dirt and debris.
b) The keyboard is non ruggedized, at least compared to the XO.
c) It uses a conventional montior arrangement rather than the OLPC "behind the monitor" arrangement. This means that it has a complex, wire heavy connector through the hinge rather than just a USB and power connection.
I don't see how the classmate could last 6 months in a third world environment.
I question some of the OLPC's intent, but their hardware design blows away that Intel POS its not even funny.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I wanted to like the OLPC -- no I wanted to *love* the OLPC. I wanted to love it so much that I wanted to tell the world how awesome it was, and how everyone should participate in the give one get one program.
Then mine arrived in the mail.
Initial reactions were off the charts. The packaging was even excellent! The machine is sturdy, well-built, solid, cleverly designed, rugged, and absolutely perfect for it's purpose. I can't say enough about how many of the design decisions were fantastic. The keyboard was perhaps smaller than I had anticipated, but with the intended use case scenarios even that didn't detract from the brilliance of the hardware.
And then I turned it on.
Anyone who says that the interface is revolutionary or different is trying to put a nice spin on it. Yes, some of the organization and terminology is novel, and one could even praise some of the attempts at getting you to re-think how computers work. But the entire thing feels astonishingly like X Windows from the late 1980s. The interfaces are clunky and inconsistent, and worst of all it suffers from a pervasive design philosophy of "because we could" not "because we should." I could easily forgive a lack of graphical polish, but it's much more difficult to forgive the nearly-20-year giant leap backwards in interface design.
I know what the slashdot crowd is thinking... "it's open source! Write a new UI yourself!" but that's not the point. My point is that I wish the OLPC project had spent half the effort on the software that they did on the hardware -- if they had, then maybe we really would have a device that would change the world. Who knows... maybe a version 2 will have a new UI that actually will.
The difference is that the OLPC is:
vi +
"Classmate specs are better than XO. There is a bit of goods in XO hardware, but not all that much"
Depends on your definition of 'better'. I don't think the OLPC hardware should be underestimated. The Classmate may have a faster processor and more storage, but it also has a shorter battery life, no 'e-book' mode, no mesh network, isn't nearly as rugged or user serviceable, and costs more. Given that a 366MHz processor and 128MB RAM is a perfectly respectable combo as long as the software is tuned for it, flexibility and longevity ought to be a more significant factor than raw [on-paper] grunt.
There's a nice recent take-apart here:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=218
Obviously a great deal of thought and design has gone into these beasties. If only my own (much-battered) machines were built like that...
I agree. The support wiki is full of holes but it seems to be getting filled out. The great advantage I see in the buy-one-give-one program was to get it in the hands of people in the FOSS community that can find such weaknesses and fix them. We can support OLPC by developing applications and providing input to the project.