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OLPC 2.0 — One Laptop Foundation Reboots
Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."
Stop vaporising this dead horse.
Now based on a discontined CPU, and renamed because they never hit the price target; hijacked by Microsoft's department of evil, I really think they need to give up.
I have preordered the Pandora console and I'm happy. It gives me about 10h of running Ubuntu on an ARM cpu in a mere 0.3 kg of weight.
Oh thre's also an unofficial blog and a video vault. You might like the forums too.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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This is significantly more than a simple reboot. The goals of 'OLPC' are entirely different than the plans of this new 'OLPC 2.0' as far as I'm concerned and I imagine it is this way for many others as well. We watched and applauded as OLPC began only to watch in dismay and tears as they project allowed itself to be taken over from within.
There are all kinds of points that could be made here, but I'll let the others bring those up. For me the complete 180 they've done has made me write them off completely as a useless relic of what happens when you completely lose sight of your goal to the point you start to believe the ends justify the means. RIP OLPC.
--bornagainpenguin
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and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year
I anticipate Bender will tell them to bite his shiny metal ass.
One Layoff Per Worker? Perhaps they should extend the "two for one" and just close the company...
The most vivid example of this philosophy, to me, was Negroponteâ(TM)s comparison of the XO and netbooks. XOs cost about $225 apiece. Netbooks, which are produced by companies like Acer and Lenovo, among others, run about $300 to $450 but offer more memory and graphics power and larger screens. So, one could ask, wonâ(TM)t the normal, cost-curve-squashing evolution of computers obviate what OLPC is trying to do, and more efficiently than a non-profit? Negroponte replies that OLPC is not trying to compete with commercial computer makers but instead asking, "What are the things the normal commercial market wonâ(TM)t be pushing?"
What won't the "normal, cost-curve-squashing evolution of computers" include? Well, I don't see a huge rush by Acer, Dell, Lenovo, and others to include cranks, solar panels, and other alternative charging options to their units. I don't think the "normal commercial market" has decided to go that direction yet. Also, I doubt highly that these same companies will ever make their equipment repairable by children as this would cut into their profit margins too much if they had to stop making computer equipment with proprietary and hard-to-replace components.
The underlying, subconscious goal (in other words, whether they realize it or not) of the OLPC project is to prove that reliable, hardy products don't have to cost a fortune. It's the mentality of the business world today to produce cheap crap that is then sold at a premium in order to finance yacht parties and private jets for the upper echelon of their employee-base. the OLPC is just one of the few outfits out there trying their best to disprove that particular business model.
As long as they don't restrict the product to less developed nations the uptake will happen. It can be argued that OLPC started the netbook category, when ASUS and Intel saw the outpouring of support. If they create a product, allow it to be sold world wide, and the developed nations will create demand and volume for the charity work.
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy. Those suckers have 9 inch screens, Atom processors, and a gig of RAM. So who needs this OLPC stuff?
I wonder what effect the OLPC had on the eee PC. If because of the OLPC businesses like Asus start making low cost, and portable, computers then I think OLPC will have done a lot. Now if only Asus would include a similar power supply, pull a cord to generate power.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I have an OLPC XO-1 and have logged a fairy decent amount of time on eee PCs(contract job, an outfit was looking to make citrix thin clients out of them).
My comparision: eeePC is notably more powerful, no question. It also feels more like a "real" computer, probably because of the hard top, rather than rubber, keyboard(also the color, obviously). The screen, though, is something else entirely. With the backlight off, or in bright sunlight, you get a 1200x900, very sharp, very readable, 200dpi, reflective LCD screen. With backlight on, or in lower light, you get color at somewhat lower, though still adequate, effective resolution. The screen is the big deal. In color mode, it is as good or better than a standard netbook screen. In greyscale, it is by far the best electronic reading device I've ever used(e-ink might be better; I've not seen it). The mesh stuff is cute; but not something I've had a chance to play with much. Sugar is interesting; but other linuxes work as well.
I can certainly see why netbooks would be largely preferable in many situations; but they cannot touch the OLPC screen, for my purposes, nor do they have any of the cute collaborative stuff(whose utility I cannot comment on).
You can already buy eee PC 900A laptops for $200 at BestBuy. Those suckers have 9 inch screens, Atom processors, and a gig of RAM. So who needs this OLPC stuff?
I think Negroponte said it best:
In the case of netbooks, he says, "You could arguably say we really created the netbook market. But if you look at the netbooks, they really copied the easy part. They didn't copy low power, they didn't copy mesh networks, they didn't copy sunlight-readable displays. All three things are absent from every single netbook."
I've personally used an OLPC before. While I'm not ready to buy one, I'm impressed with just how fine the design and build quality is for its intended purpose.
Seems like Slashdotters get regularly stuck in a mindset of "geez, it wouldn't work for me, therefore it must be crap." There are several billion other people on this planet, a sizeable number of whom might like it just fine.
Silly of me to ask, I know.
They have collocated 1 million machines.
The bloody point of these machines is to require as little infrastructure as possible.
Where they failed is:
- Never trying to harness economies of scale.
- Internal political squabbling (mostly brought by Negroponte and his silly decision to use Windows, thus becoming a collaborator with the expansion of the Windows monopoly).
- The failure to harness the impetus of the FOSS community in order to obviate many of the production costs related to software. The bare minimum to achieve this would be to ensure a free OS is at the core of the project.
Sort out these issues and you will have many takers, even in the poorest countries there are children with access to some infrastructure that would benefit enormously with such a device.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
but its not really lower power than netbooks.
Fully agree on that, the thing last 3 hours on normal use, thats nothing special, far from it. They still haven't even enabled the power saving stuff in the default configuration and the checkbox for that only made it their in the last release and of course it doesn't exactly work great, since the switching between sleep mode and normal one is very noticable. At least normal standby is now working, but even that took a long long while to implement.
Does the mesh networking actually work in the XO? And the mesh networking, how useful is it anyway?
In the type of setting for which the OLPC was designed for (i.e. school with plenty of OLPCs around), very useful I guess. In the western world on the other side: rather useless, since you have a hard time finding anybody with a OLPC to mesh network and instead just connect to the next best WLAN access point.
And the XO's G1G1 is hardly "poor economy", its that the XO early adopter-types got them the first go-round, so there was no one LEFT in the second.
I think the failure was a simple matter of price, you can today buy a better machine for less money. The $400 was never a competitive price to begin with (for refernce: thats the same one as Sonys PS3 has), but in the first round they didn't have competition, in the second they had plenty. By making the offer time limited and the price twice as high as needed they certainly ruined their chances and gave the competition plenty of room to get solid offerings on the ground.
All that said, ruggedness and sunlight readable screen are great and still something that no other laptop has. But slow development on the software side and complete failure to properly sell the thing to consumers just couldn't lead to a happy ending.
It often seems to me that the engineering was the only thing that OLPC got right. Everything else was like a lesson in how NOT to do it.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
You're right to point out that netbook owners can power their own netbook with a crank or whatever the OLPC ended up using, but the interesting part of the quote is "we really created the netbook market." Hilarious how they'll say that now, when they refused to sell the OLPC to anyone that actually wanted one in the US or Europe. Now that they can buy EEE's, there's (basically) no reason for someone in a developed country to even consider the OLPC.
If they had marketed the OLPC to everyone, they not only would have created the netbook market they would have owned it, while subsidizing their efforts in Africa. Instead, Asus jumped in where OLPC wouldn't... and here we are where we're at today. Asus is making a killing while OLPC has essentially folded.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
It can be argued that OLPC started the netbook category, when ASUS and Intel saw the outpouring of support.
This is the only article I could find cited by Wikipedia supporting the widely-repeated claim that OLPC inspired the "netbook" market, and this is just speculation by one UK blogger. Yet it's cited as a source for a factual statement in Wikipedia article about the XO-1 filled with "citation needed" tags.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's kind of a broad and evangelistic claim and requires a little more research.
Thankfully, Gizmodo did an excellent series on the trials and triumphs of OLPC, including the "who invented the netbook" question. There's no clear answer, but it definitely appears that the OLPC woke up computer manufacturers to the fact that there was a large, untapped market out there for cheap "netbooks."
So who needs this OLPC stuff?
Off the top of my head:
The cheap eee PC laptops still don't serve those purposes. They probably never will, since it is a very specialized and likely unprofitable market.
I wonder why anyone mods this as insightful. The OLPC was not designed for people who shop at BestBuy. It was designed for children in the third world who often don't have power and rarely have an internet connection. It was designed to be rugged, easily repairable and to be used for years. Netbooks are just the next version of consumer throwaway junk.
"Developing" != "war torn and starving." There are lots of impoverished areas that have food and clean water, just insufficient education. That's where this laptop was aimed at.
I The last thing we need to be sending to people who are starving to death and getting shot by wandering bands of "people's militias" is a damn computer.
Your frequently stated argument is bogus.
I have lived as an expatriate in rural Africa for many years, and have personally known both starvers and shootees. They are a tragic but small minority of the people of Africa. One of the biggest problems facing the education system in the country in which I lived (Ghana) is the expense and unavailability of teaching materials. Rare is the classroom where anyone other than the teacher has a textbook, and frequently even the teacher doesn't have one.
The OLPC project directly addresses this issue, making low cost (free) teaching materials available on the desks of the children.
Delivering education to people addresses many of the underlying issues that cause the starving and shooting.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
I thought this quote from the article was quite scary:
"The Rwandan leader initially ordered 10,000 XOs, then upped it to 100,000. The program now makes up a large fraction of the countryâ(TM)s education budget, according to Negroponte."
I'm all up for the use of computers in a developed world, including the OLPC initiative but considering most of these countries don't have a basic deployment of schools, teachers, books, etc isn't it unwise to spend a "large fraction" of your budget on OLPCs?
My -- that is my *daughter's* -- XO is very low power. Whether it's the power savings across the whole chipset, the ability to enter certain sleep states while keeping the display on, no hard drive, whatever: it's got a tiny power supply, charges quickly (bonus: with a wide range of input voltages!), and never gets hot. Seems really freakin' low power to me.
Of course, others have pointed out that it's rugged. (If you haven't handled one, it's easy to fail to appreciate this fully.)
The keyboard is fine. Not great, but fine. And certainly tough. If you're a kid, it's great. No, you're not going to break any world records for typing speeds, but that's not what it's for.
But all this ignores the software. I'm not a fan of Sugar, but I do see just how much it buys you from an educational perspective. If you wanted to get a kid to start learning to program, this computer is *ideal*. The programming activities are just begging for you to tinker, and the fact that it's all Python means that as you learn, you can start modifying the interface.
The basic activities draw in even very young children very quickly. My daughter at 2 liked hitting keys on the keyboard of the mac and the linux Thinkpad. She *loved* playing with the music activities, or even the simple text-to-speech program, on the XO. Sure, you could replicate the functionality on a netbook with linux. Unless you installed Sugar, however, you would have a *lot* of work to do to make it as inviting.
Again, I say this despite the fact that I don't like Sugar. IceWM and no journal trying to index 8 gig flash drives suits me fine. But to get kids seriously involved in computing, the software is as impressively put together as the hardware.
It's easy to say they should have sold them at $250 each. They thought they were going to get millions of orders from developing countries, and they didn't want to get distracted trying to serve the developed world. They didn't realize that Microsoft/Intel would undermine their efforts in the ways that they did. They were idealistic and focused and didn't foresee certain things. I'll cut them some slack, since their focus did result in something so beautifully engineered.
Bummer if they don't ship many millions of XOs, great that they showed what is possible in the neighborhood of $200-$300.
Even with the dropping prices of netbooks, I'd still say that an XO is worth $400. If your child would otherwise get a PS3, no question.
the thing last 3 hours on normal use
That's just not true. In full backlight mode and WiFi you might get 3 hours on the OLPC, but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode, in ebook mode without WiFi, you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.
Fact is OLPC chose a lower capacity battery using a new type of technology which, doesn't pollute, doesn't explode (like netbook batteries potentially do), and most importantly the OLPC battery lifetime is much longer. A normal netbook Lithium-Ion battery lowers it's capacity already afte 500 recharge cycles, after about 1500 charge cycles, a normal netbook lithium-ion battery usually is totally dead. While the OLPC battery keeps its charge capacity for moe than 5000 recharge cycles. Which means the same OLPC can last more than 5 years with the same battery capacity while netbook batteries last only about 1-2 years.
OLPC has shipped (IIRC) 1 million machines, a number of pilot programs have gone well and will soon probably turn into larger purchases, the number of volunteers doing support, local training and infrastructure continues to increase geometrically.
OLPC doesn't have a bunch of market droids making sure that the PR is out there, but IMHO they have done, and are continuing to do, great things.
I don't think OLPC is over yet - quite the contrary.
And in answer to the 'poor folks don't need computers' - that is just stupid. The OLPC is one of the _answers_ to the problems of not enough books, schools, teachers, etc. For my own part, if I had had an XO when I was a kid, I could have taught myself at more than twice the rate that the schools worked at.
For real students, the net is the key to breaking out of the straitjacket of public education, which (like a team of horses) can only go as fast as the slowest person in the room. A networked laptop has the potential to provide a kind and level of freedom most people could not have dreamed of a few decades ago - the freedom to learn, to understand, to communicate and to compete.
Many developing nations are foregoing the expense of wired telecomms, using cellular instead - it's cheaper to do unless you already have wires in place. By adding a simple Wi-Fi hook at appropriate places, these countries could support the XO's networking at minimal extra cost.
Think of it this way - a developing nation with a computer-savvy young cohort, that is used to living on dirt, could become the biggest competitive nightmare that the developed world has seen yet. In ten years, we could have budding computer and bio-tech gurus coming out of Rwanda, like Steve Jobs and the other Silicon Valley geeks came out of the SF Bay Area in the 1970's.
Those kids will have the potential and the tools to break the cycle of cultural suppression that Africa has long suffered, to break the traditions of tribal conflict and to join together in creating new 'Black Tiger' national economic engines, like the 'Asian Tiger' nations of the 1980's.
And that will be something to see. I look forward to it.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
They have clean water in Ohio now?