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OLPC's XO-1.75 Laptop To Have a Multitouch Screen
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child has revealed it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware. The XO-1.75 with a touch-sensitive 8.9-inch screen will start shipping next year. The laptop will run on an Arm processor and is the successor to the current XO-1.5 laptop, which runs on a Via x86 processor. OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet, which is due to ship in 2012. Fedora will continue to be the base Linux distribution for XO-1.75 as the laptop changes from the x86 to Arm architecture."
"One C&D per child"
Will there be another "Buy One, Give One" promotion?
The one thing with multi-touch is the possibility of patents interfering with the ability to use it. While this might not be a problem for some OSS projects or large companies with the ability to add in a few dollars to the price to pay for patent fees, I can see this being an issue for something as cost-conscious as the OLPC's laptop because even an extra $5 could make a huge difference.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
STOP TOUCHING MY MONITOR.
Yes, caps are like yelling. That was my intention.
There are a lot of places that have clean water and enough food, but lack ways of getting ahead, lack good educations, etc. The internet and computers can change that and help train people to actually use technology and get ahead.
What good is surviving based on food and water without any progress?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
How many children have the OLPC already? Three? Wouldn't it be better to focus on cheap production methods instead of adding the latest fad?
-- Cheers!
What's your definition of a "REAL COMPUTER?"
Shit that's outdated compared to today's watches put our ass into space.
It's still a real computer.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...Ok, so what do -you- think we should be sending the third world? $999 Macbooks? $300 Celeron 900 cheap laptops? A $1,200 Core i7 notebook?
The OLPC makes -sense- because it is A) Cheap, B) Very readable in sunlight C) Is Linux-Based and puts a high priority on development and D) Has decent-ish specs.
Think of your first computer. Chances are, unless you were relatively wealthy when you got your first PC, it was a generic, low-end system, sometimes not even a compatible model to what was the "standard" of the time. For me, it was a Commodore 64 way after its prime and way after IBM-compatible systems were the standard. It taught me BASIC and the fundamentals of programming and computer use, could I get a job just by knowing that Commodore 64? No, but it set the foundation to make learning MS-DOS, Windows and later *Nix very easy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
How convenient for you to say that, from behind a keyboard and living in place where virtually anybody who wants can have at least rudimentary access to a computer & the web.
One that hath name thou can not otter
"General" education isn't always needed in the third world, skills however are. Who cares if you can read Virgil in Latin, know all of the kings of England and have the periodic table memorized. However, if you can download a diagram of how to build a simple well and treat the water, that is useful. If you can find organic fertilizers that work to make the crop harvest better. If you can figure out more efficient ways of building huts, learn science to contradict harmful superstitious beliefs of your tribe, etc. you have something valuable.
General education is a luxury really only useful in the third world, for the rest of the world, skills are paramount, "education" doesn't matter.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
These are far more advanced than my first several computers. They are certainly not toys. If you are referring to the user interface decisions that are geared towards making the system more child friendly, then all I can suggest is that they are trying to make learning more fun. Not necessarily a bad idea. The machines are still capable of doing all of using productivity applications that are needed in a non-toy computer.
I live in Thailand and there are plenty of kids here who could use these things. Upcountry get a lot of donated books for example in learning english, that's great except they're all different books so learning in the classroom is extremely difficult. Also no one wants to teach there because it's in the middle of no where.
Giving kids a computer with ebooks that have all the same material and/or can speak out english to help them pronounce better would be a huge win. Even cost isn't an issue, the Thai government has already wasted billions on useless thrown away ID cards, this would be a drop in the ocean.
So what benefit did that really have on your knowledge of computers? The OLPC isn't designed to be an expensive top of the line computer because how many do you think we could send? For the cheapest "standard" laptop you can buy which is around $300, you could send 2, perhaps 3 OLPCs to the third world. Did you go out and buy a Ferrari for your first car too?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
It's easy to say that when your only experience is of a western education. Why don't you come to a third world country and see for yourself. The teachers don't know the subjects they're teaching, they can't get good teachers because no one wants to live there, the students books are all different in the class room because they are all donations.
Spending money of computers as reading devices IS the right decision here. It allows everyone to share the same material, it allows media to be played so kids can learn new languages even if the teacher doesn't know himself.
The title and summary of the story contradict themselves.
Title: "OLPC's XO-1.75 Laptop To Have a Multitouch Screen"
Summary: "OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet"
The title is wrong; the summary is correct. Multitouch in XO-3. XO-1.75 will only have a touchscreen. Way to edit. I'm sorry for RTFA, I'm new here, won't happen again.
Somebody very close to me did a stiny in a fairly well-known (not religious) organization that travels around the world and teaches poor civilizations self-sufficiency, also helping them modernize their businesses and agriculture.
She went in an altruistic, bleeding-heart hippie ready to give it her all. She came out with strong anti-immigrant sentiments, resentful that the people she had worked so hard to help just kept asking for handouts instead of making any effort to better themselves. She lamented that the current soft approach was, "treating the symptoms, and not the illness."
Also, sending high-priced items to developing countries for cheap or free is really really really tempting fate as far as graft and corruption are concerned.
Imagine a whole bunch of $1000 laptops are given away free, or even for $250 to the third world, thanks to generous donations and so on. Then mysteriously, a bunch of laptops, each worth $1000, show up on ebay for $750, and certainly unrelatedly, a whole bunch of sub-$500 laptops actually get to the intended audience. Must have been a mixup in shipping. Pay no attention to the man buying the golden toilets.
And like you say, what's the improvement? There's not a whole lot more you can do with a performance computer when you haven't yet learned to use computers. You don't need to lend them your Ferrari so they can learn to drive, either. It's common sense.
Why? Is there a free WoW account with each laptop?
Only if each OLPC comes with a towel.
It is the good teachers part that is hard. Just think about when you were in high school in a first-world country, how many of the teachers were actually good? How many actually knew much about the subject they were teaching. Now, if we can't even get good teachers in the first world for competitive pay and those teachers are highly educated, then how do you expect the third world to get good, accurate, and native teachers? With the internet, even though a teacher might not be an expert at some subject, the teacher -can- connect to experts and show their students it on their own laptop. Some things can't just be explained with pen and paper, for example, how would one explain the sound of an electric guitar to someone who has never heard it? Videos and the like are very good tools to cater to the uneducated masses, after all one only needs to look at the first world to see that. Books are also very expensive for what you get. The internet is nearly limitless when it comes to scale, if someone really wants to study something like Macroeconomics, you aren't going to get a good book that can walk someone through all stages of expertise from an introduction to advanced studies, but with the internet it is easy.
Each student is different and even the best first-world teachers aren't experts in everything, the internet lets them connect to experts to teach things beyond what they ordinarily could.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
E) Durable as hell. I challenge anyone to find a $200 netbook that is waterproof, let alone one that can be dropped from 7 or 8 feet repeatedly without worrying about if it will survive. F) Grid networking. Instead of crowding around a single access point that might not be in reach, a school full of OLPC's can piggyback on eachother's signals to get much further than otherwise possible.
And let's not forget that the XO project is partially responsible for the existence of netbooks. Intel and Microsoft both made reference netbook platforms in response to the perceived threat of OLPC platform. (politics, someone else can jump in with the sordid history, I'm sure). Basically, when it was announced a $100 (cough $200) laptop was considered ludicrous, and a lot of effort went into making viable platforms. Now, netbooks are almost an impulse buy.
The keyboard's pretty terrible, but other than that the OLPC is a surprisingly well designed platform for the environment it finds itself in.
The ______ Agenda
One thing that amazes me is how persistent Nicholas Negroponte is. Despite having setbacks, scandals, poor reception of his devices, countries renouncing their support of his project, and as far as I can tell no real success, he still keeps on coming. I don't know if he will accomplish anything with this next model, but if there is anything at all that can be accomplished by giving children one laptop each, this man will accomplish it.
Qxe4
That's why they are activated by the school server, and secured by Bitfrost. If a non G1G1 XO ends up on EBay, it will not function.
The OLPC is easily thousands of times as powerful as your first computer.
The ______ Agenda
G) Passively cooled with no moving parts. Try wandering around Best Buy throwing sand into off-the-shelf laptops and see how long before you're thrown out with a huge repair bill.
The ______ Agenda
Mesh networking works great.
As far as I know, the solar panel thing was experimented with, but not produced.
I had a friend at Red Hat who worked on the software for the OLPC. His version had a hand crank. For very real, very important durability reasons it was removed.
Windows is an option, though the default is still Sugar / Linux. I don't know numbers on how many of what have shipped.
1.5 million have shipped, mostly to South America and parts of Africa.
OLPC is still full of engineers out to help the developing world.
The ______ Agenda
Can't say that the experience in my country has been a wild success, but still things has changed since most school children here in Uruguay got their XO, and not just for the children.
And if well it went for children for most social classes (they were deployed in all public schools, so some private schools didnt got them) somewhat chokes you to see poor children on the streets playing with them or browsing internet close to places with free wifi.
They can't normally be bought except in large government-level quantities, but if you want to get your hands on one for testing, you can apply for the contributors' program. Basically you submit a project proposal on how you're going to use the units, and it's kinda like a grant except they send you laptop units.
You can volunteer as a developer and if you submit a good project proposal, there's a good chance of being sent some units.
You can check it out and apply here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program
http://www.object404.com
It's Old World, New World and Thirld World
Your parents were wealthy if they could afford a top of the line system. Being able to spend that much on anything nonessential to survival puts you easily into the top 10% of the world's population by wealth, and probably into the top 5%. The OLPC system is aimed at far less wealthy people than your parents.
One of the people who's just become involved with an open source project that I run is in India. His parents' annual income is only slightly more than the cost of my laptop. He is using a 300MHz Celeron, which he managed to scrounge, and it's the fastest machine that he has access to. It has 64MB of RAM, so nontrivial compile jobs cause a lot of swapping. His Internet connection is heavily metered, so he can only download things in the middle of the night (when it's off-peak time). He is the sort of person that this project is aimed at.
The first computer that I learned to use was a BBC Model B. This had a 2MHz 8-bit CPU and 32KB of RAM, in a time when a typical PC had a 12MHz 286 and 1MB of RAM. The first computer that I owned was scrounged from my father's workplace and was an 8MHz (16-bit) 8086 clone, with 640KB of RAM running MS DOS and Windows 3.0, in a time when my father's laptop was a 126Hz (32-bit) 386 with 5MB of RAM.
Now, most of the work I do is on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, or Solaris. How much do you think I learned on a BBC or a DOS PC that is directly relevant to those platforms? A lot. Both had easily accessible developer tools.
The BBC booted directly into a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct interfacing with the hardware (for controlling robots and suchlike via the array of easy-to-use I/O ports it had) and even had things like a built-in assembler. For the PC, I had a PL/M compiler, which taught me about low-level programming and made it easy for me to learn C (I later got a C compiler for the machine, but C feels painfully primitive as a low-level language in comparison to PL/M). When I got a 386 (my father's old laptop, when he got a 486), it ran Windows 3.11 and have Visual C++ 2.0 installed.
By the time I arrived at university, I was already moderately competent in about a dozen programming languages. This would probably not have been the case if my first computer experience had not been with something like the BBC, where programming was the easiest thing to do. That is the point of the OLPC. The user is able to modify absolutely any part of the software stack, and is encouraged to do so. Do you really think they'd be better off with machines that functioned as appliances and didn't encourage understanding?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not true. Linux compiles with ICC and with Clang. It used to compile with some patches with TCC too, but I don't know if it still does.
That said, it's a lot easier to build a GNU system without Linux than a Linux system without GNU.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Do you have any idea how expensive books, paper, and pencils are? My mother taught in schools in the UK, and they could barely afford the books, paper, and pencils that they needed. Teachers are even more expensive.
Yes, it would be great to be able to give these people all of that stuff. It would also be great to give them fibre-optic broadband, nuclear power plants, stable electricity and water grids, and so on. It's not even remotely economically feasible. The point of OLPC is not to give them the best possible help, it's to give them the best affordable help, and hopefully help them get into a position where they can give themselves the best possible help in a generation's time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
.Ok, so what do -you- think we should be sending the third world? $999 Macbooks? $300 Celeron 900 cheap laptops? A $1,200 Core i7 notebook?
*puts on flame retardant suit*
Honestly? I think we should send the third world some papers explaining why their constant violence and lack of everyone being held accountable by the law keeps them from being able to move up, no matter how much technology they get.
If they just cut the constant violence and crime, companies would start building factories there and would start bringing technology with them. No sane company is going to build a new factory in the middle of a war zone.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
For a long time, I have wanted a tablet like device which I can write/draw on, and use with pen-optimized input systems like ShapeWriter or HexInput. (Though ideally, I would like to write one myself...)
Is there any such hardware? As far as I am aware, it should be possible to offer multitouch and a stylus in the same device. The lack of both makes such devices much less compelling.