Negroponte On OLPC's New Path, Plans For XO 3

waderoush writes "After laying off staff and splitting the organization in two, Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child effort may be hitting their stride again. In an interview with Xconomy, Negroponte says he has a new model for getting XO laptops to kids in Gaza and Afghanistan — and reveals more ideas about the planned XO 3 tablet and the future of books. 'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."

Comments

Re:Gaza?

[Narcocide]

According to TFA they've already placed around 3,000 there, so... yes?

Re:I used a book today

[Obfuscant]

I opened up my PRS-505 today looking for a book. I could write a tome twice as long as yours detailing the problems dealing with that little beasty and completely ignore the benefits of the format, just as you have. Just to mention a few: no backlight, so I had to turn the page towards the light to read it... and it crashed while rendering the page I wanted to read, so it took five minutes to reboot, rescanning every document to extract titles from each PDF. After it rebooted, the clock was off by ten years, which for most things would be a detriment, but for this it is a benefit: the DRM on "library" books checked out is based on the reader clock, and I now have 1000 more days to read the books I checked out for two weeks (three months ago.) Oh, while it was busy scanning every document, it consumed 1/3 of the charge on the battery.

Or a kewl final problem: you can plug it into a computer USB port and it will recharge, but if you plug it into a USB POWER source (no computer) it will happily keep running the CPU trying to enumerate itself on the bus, never allocate power for itself to charge, and drain the battery in an hour or less. BUT, you can plug in a coaxial power adapter right next to the mini-USB connector and it will happily charge up quickly. ($24.95 for the AC adapter from Sony. $2 for a USB-coax cable from electronics shop.) And if you use the "safely disconnect" option under Windows to safely disconnect the beasty from your computer but don't immediately disconnect it, it goes back to "trying to connect" mode and discharges the battery.