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First Review of Intel's New Classmate PC
An anonymous reader writes "Intel gave the press a sneak preview of its 3rd generation Classmate PC at IDF. It looks like this guy managed to kidnap the only working sample for a while and write up a full report. It looks like a major departure from the original, with a rotating touch screen and Atom processor. There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade."
OLPC started the whole sub-mini notebook craze. It was Wintel that did the raining*. It's bad enough the American monopolies had to get their greedy paws in the OLPC pie; let's at least keep the facts straight.
[*] - http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4472654.ece
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
There's no official word on pricing yet, but no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade.
Huh?
Let's do a quick review.
0) OLPC starts working on a laptop. It has a non-Intel chip and is designed for ultra power efficiency.
1) Intel starts working on their own laptop. Intel's of course has an Intel CPU; and it is designed to run Windows.
2) Official Intel sales people start trying to sell the Classmate to countries that are considering the OLPC laptop. In at least one case, an Intel sales person went to a country that had already agreed to buy OLPC laptops, and said in effect "That thing won't even run Windows... you sure you really want it?" At the time, Intel was officially a member of OLPC. (Rogue sales people? Evil corporate double-dealing? You decide.)
Now, what's up with "no doubt the OLPC guys will try to rain on Intel's parade"? The OLPC guys are the overbearing bullies and Intel is the underdog here?
I'm sure there are markets for something like the Classmate PC. I don't think it's the best choice for places with no electric infrastructure. And it has a cooling fan, so I don't think it's the best choice for places that are really hot, humid, and/or dusty. And I'm sure it costs about twice as much as the OLPC, so I don't think it's the best choice for the truly poor markets. And it almost certainly is much harder to repair than the OLPC design.[1] Hmmm. Am I raining on Intel's parade?
All that said, the world is a large place full of lots of kids. No way can OLPC crank out enough computers to help everyone. If Intel can sell their computer into the more affluent areas, they can make money. If their sales people can leave the OLPC markets alone, maybe Intel and OLPC can just get along.
P.S. I suspect that neither OLPC nor Intel will have the last word on educational computers for the masses. I'm starting to think that the best design would be a simple tablet that actually does cost $100 or less, and probably runs an ARM chip or something for crazy long battery life.
steveha
[1] From the photos, it's a pretty conventional clamshell, which means lots of connections running through the hinge so the motherboard can be in the base and the display in the lid; the OLPC design has motherboard and display in the lid, so that all that needs to run through the hinge is basically a USB cable. Teen-aged kids, armed with simple screwdrivers, can take apart two broken OLPC laptops, swap parts, and produce a working OLPC laptop. I really doubt this will be possible with the Classmate.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
No, what he's saying is that it's not about learning to use a computer, it's about using a computer to facilitate learning. Computer skills are fairly transferable. If you can learn the basics, learning to use another computer is fairly easy.
Actually it's not quite the same issue. As steveha said under a different thread:
By 2020, the current Windows UI will be 25 years old. And one of the big complaints you tend to get from people who have moved directly from the Win 9X line to XP or Vista is that many of the default views (particularly the Control Panel's default view) has changed so drastically that it's difficult to figure out where to configure specific settings.
So again, this is a completely useless reason for using Windows on systems designed for kids. I doubt the Windows UI is going to last 25 years without change -- and if it does, Microsoft will by then be so unimportant in the computing world that nobody is going to be using their OS anyhow.
Yaz.
According to those numbers, vista is a failure. It isn't success if you're primarily gaining usershare through hardware failure.
From September to July on that chart, the xp+vista+2k goes from ~90.4% to ~89.6% I was almost "generous" and went to lump "other" in on the assumption it was 95/98, but then the drop would be nearly 1.5%
A .8% loss isn't horrible, but Macs grew 1.12% and Linux grew .33%
If Vista is growing(in gross numbers, as opposed to percentages), Linux and Mac are growing faster in relative terms according to your chart.
I don't know, Vista resembles win 95. The user differences are really not that different.
You're right, at the heart, they're really not all that different. Would you say that Gnome or KDE is more or less different from Vista than Win 95 is different from Vista? With the tendency of all of the user interfaces to copy from one another, I think KDE and Gnome are probably closer to Vista than 95 was.
Personally, I'd say that since most of the current user interfaces use the same basic window, icon, mouse/touchscreen/touchpad, pointer and keyboard paradigm, they'd leave any current student in about the same position for the world of 15 years from now -- and let us hope there's some progress made on user interfaces between now and then, both for Microsoft and competitors (proprietary AND free / open source).
Like Yaz, I learned to use computers in the 80s on TRS-80, Apple IIe, and C64 computers - and I don't have a problem with Vista, Gnome, KDE or OSX today. Most of those systems didn't even have mice! The basic concepts are more important than the particulars.
Newer ones are basically flash based mp3 players using a different recording codec. Most plug directly into the usb ports on your pc/laptop like a flash pen, so you can just chuck the files on to review or transcribe at a later time.
If you've got some well trained Voice-rec software, even better.