To be fair, the approaches of the two projects are a bit different. OLPC is like the Apple of the third-world-laptop world. They're designing a specific set of hardware, and tailoring not just an OS but a specific educational software suite to run on it.
Cherrypal is like the PC, taking the "beige box" approach of just buy or throw together any old thing, all it has to do is access the Internet. Let the organizations who buy it come up with their own curricula.
(And by the way, my interview with the chairman of Cherrypal is now up on TeleRead.)
The niche is a little larger than that, actually, and it's an entirely different one.
The target are people who need Internet access but can't afford anything better. As more and more government and other services nudge people toward the Internet, those below the "digital divide" have an increasingly hard time accessing those services.
It's their $349 higher-end netbook, with an Atom CPU and 13" screen. They claim they were using the name well before Microsoft started using it for their search engine.
As it happens, I will be getting a review unit of the Africa, and of the Bing, to review for TeleRead, so I will have a chance to evaluate them. It is possible that the Africa may well have better specs than the minimums promised, in which case it would be a matter of comparing the specific unit I have to what's available on that refurb site.
Well, I'm going to get my hands on review units of the Africa and the Bing so I'll see how they look in person. I can't speak to the Bing's similarity to the Mac, but I will note that I only heard of Bing a couple of months ago and I gather CherryPal was making its prior model of Bing earlier than that.
And I'll definitely be asking him about the components vs. job lots matter in the interview tomorrow. His blog post certainly makes it SOUND like components.
Of course, even if they are job lots and not hand-assembled, the Africa still looks a pretty good value. As I pointed out in my article linked from the OP, the closest thing to those basic specs is the Menq EasyPC (similar specs but less memory), and that normally wholesales at $80. Getting something at least slightly better for $99 retail seems reasonable by comparison.
Someone down-thread is talking about reconditioned Eee 7" models costing $100. I haven't been able to find anything like that for less than $250. And while my budget might stretch to a $99 Africa, it certainly won't stretch to a $250 Eee.
Wait for the Slashdotting to die down and their webserver to come back up. Then place your order via the store on their website. They take credit cards or Western Union. Be sure and specify in the "order instructions" textbox whether you want Windows or Linux.
They were when they started shipping them, according to Max's blog post.. They could be offering anything at this point. The only thing they guarantee is that you'll get at least those minimum specs. They don't guarantee that you'll get anything better, but they say you probably will.
My gut feeling is that you'll almost always come out ahead of the minimum specs on at least one or two facets (like, you might get a better processor if nothing else, or more disk space if nothing else) just because given how prices fluctuate on parts it would be impossible for them to exactly meet the minimum without specifically trying. They would deliberately have set the minimum to be a fallback position that they knew for a fact they could always better at that price range.
And if all I want to do is surf the web, check e-mail, read e-books, and write, hell, a 2-pound Africa will be a hell of a lot better than the 8 pound Toshiba Satellite laptop I currently have. And at $100, it will be cheaper than even the cheapest iPod Touch. It's not like I'm going to be rendering Avatar on it or something.
You specify which OS you want at time of order, in the "order instructions" box. If you say "give me all Linux, please" they'll do it for you.
Windows might be more of a standardization issue. From reading between the lines in their blog post (where Max said you'd get "at least" Windows CE, but not Vista or 7), I got the feeling that you might get either Windows CE or Windows XP, depending on which OS the processor they had available that day would support.
Personally, I think it's kind of neat that they can make cheap machines out of literally whatever they can get their hands on. It's kind of like something Cory Doctorow would write.
Actually, according to their website, they'll ship anywhere in the world for $19 flat rate shipping. So it will cost whatever $119 comes out to in pounds whenever you order it.
Nice to see another open EP server. I'd suggest coming up with your own front page rather than ripping off Etherpad's, though. It could lead to confusion.
I really do think that this was the best thing that could possibly have happened to EtherPad. While it was still closed-source, it was locked up in the hands of one company. There was always the risk it could go away for good. (As very nearly happened right after Google bought them.) It's possible they might even have used the patent they claimed was "pending" to stifle competition if someone created a similar app from scratch.
But now it belongs to all of us, and anyone with the expertise to set it up can run a pad server for his own writing circle or for the world. People might even hack in new features and share them, like that Wave Federation thing Iba mentioned in the blog post.
But even if EtherPad's codebase stays the same forever, it's ours now and we can use it however we want.
Small wonder they wanted to acquire AppJet to send its programmers to the Google Wave slave mines to make Wave work more like EtherPad. I'm tickled pink they went through with their pledge to open-source it, and did it so quickly.
Isn't it amazing? This is the code that was AppJet's entire revenue stream...and after Google bought them for ten million dollars, they're giving all that work away to the community, free.
You can argue all you want about whether Google is really evil or not, but either way it certainly has its non-evil moments.
Oddly enough, I just wrote a fairly lengthy review of Rainbows End over on TeleRead.org. Submitted it to Slashdot; it's still pending. (I'm not optimistic, but it was worth a try.) I talk some about the book, and about how Vernor Vinge's ideas for "the book of the future" have been evolving and changing since True Names.
It'll be fascinating if this technology actually starts to show up in real life.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, they're going to be layering Adobe's proprietary DRM on top of the ePub. So even if ePub is itself an open format, it's going to be contaminated by Adobe DRM. (There's still no way to read Adobe DRM'd books on the iPhone/iPod Touch, by the way, unless you crack them.)
I covered the FTC meeting for TeleRead.org (though since I'm connected right now through an iPod Touch from a hospital exam room I don't have any way to fetch the link).
I also was credited by name for a question asked at the beginning of the last panel.:)
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, the approaches of the two projects are a bit different. OLPC is like the Apple of the third-world-laptop world. They're designing a specific set of hardware, and tailoring not just an OS but a specific educational software suite to run on it.
Cherrypal is like the PC, taking the "beige box" approach of just buy or throw together any old thing, all it has to do is access the Internet. Let the organizations who buy it come up with their own curricula.
(And by the way, my interview with the chairman of Cherrypal is now up on TeleRead.)
According to their chairman, they use Debian.
The niche is a little larger than that, actually, and it's an entirely different one.
The target are people who need Internet access but can't afford anything better. As more and more government and other services nudge people toward the Internet, those below the "digital divide" have an increasingly hard time accessing those services.
I talked with their chairman about it, and wrote up the interview last night.
It's the one linked from the the write-up, the link about buying odd lots.
Here's my account of, excerpts from, and opinions about the interview.
It's 3,300 words long. (Yes, yes, I know, "TL; DR". :P )
It's their $349 higher-end netbook, with an Atom CPU and 13" screen. They claim they were using the name well before Microsoft started using it for their search engine.
Thank you for pointing that out.
As it happens, I will be getting a review unit of the Africa, and of the Bing, to review for TeleRead, so I will have a chance to evaluate them. It is possible that the Africa may well have better specs than the minimums promised, in which case it would be a matter of comparing the specific unit I have to what's available on that refurb site.
Well, I'm going to get my hands on review units of the Africa and the Bing so I'll see how they look in person. I can't speak to the Bing's similarity to the Mac, but I will note that I only heard of Bing a couple of months ago and I gather CherryPal was making its prior model of Bing earlier than that.
And I'll definitely be asking him about the components vs. job lots matter in the interview tomorrow. His blog post certainly makes it SOUND like components.
Of course, even if they are job lots and not hand-assembled, the Africa still looks a pretty good value. As I pointed out in my article linked from the OP, the closest thing to those basic specs is the Menq EasyPC (similar specs but less memory), and that normally wholesales at $80. Getting something at least slightly better for $99 retail seems reasonable by comparison.
Someone down-thread is talking about reconditioned Eee 7" models costing $100. I haven't been able to find anything like that for less than $250. And while my budget might stretch to a $99 Africa, it certainly won't stretch to a $250 Eee.
Please point me to where these mythical refurbished Eees can be found? I was not able to find anything for less than $250, even open-box.
I'll be writing them up for TeleRead.org. I may also post the audio of it as a podcast afterward if Seybold gives me permission.
Good question. I'll be sure to ask it when I interview Max Seybold tomorrow.
They might simply be buying a lot of different-sized cases, different motherboards, and so on.
But I'll ask about that when I interview Max Seybold tomorrow.
Because, of course, we all know that Slashdotting lasts forever, and the site will now be gone for all eternity.
Or maybe it's just that Slashdot readers have the attention span of a fruit fly. :P
Wait for the Slashdotting to die down and their webserver to come back up. Then place your order via the store on their website. They take credit cards or Western Union. Be sure and specify in the "order instructions" textbox whether you want Windows or Linux.
They were when they started shipping them, according to Max's blog post.. They could be offering anything at this point. The only thing they guarantee is that you'll get at least those minimum specs. They don't guarantee that you'll get anything better, but they say you probably will.
My gut feeling is that you'll almost always come out ahead of the minimum specs on at least one or two facets (like, you might get a better processor if nothing else, or more disk space if nothing else) just because given how prices fluctuate on parts it would be impossible for them to exactly meet the minimum without specifically trying. They would deliberately have set the minimum to be a fallback position that they knew for a fact they could always better at that price range.
And if all I want to do is surf the web, check e-mail, read e-books, and write, hell, a 2-pound Africa will be a hell of a lot better than the 8 pound Toshiba Satellite laptop I currently have. And at $100, it will be cheaper than even the cheapest iPod Touch. It's not like I'm going to be rendering Avatar on it or something.
You specify which OS you want at time of order, in the "order instructions" box. If you say "give me all Linux, please" they'll do it for you.
Windows might be more of a standardization issue. From reading between the lines in their blog post (where Max said you'd get "at least" Windows CE, but not Vista or 7), I got the feeling that you might get either Windows CE or Windows XP, depending on which OS the processor they had available that day would support.
Personally, I think it's kind of neat that they can make cheap machines out of literally whatever they can get their hands on. It's kind of like something Cory Doctorow would write.
Actually, according to their website, they'll ship anywhere in the world for $19 flat rate shipping. So it will cost whatever $119 comes out to in pounds whenever you order it.
Nice to see another open EP server. I'd suggest coming up with your own front page rather than ripping off Etherpad's, though. It could lead to confusion.
I really do think that this was the best thing that could possibly have happened to EtherPad. While it was still closed-source, it was locked up in the hands of one company. There was always the risk it could go away for good. (As very nearly happened right after Google bought them.) It's possible they might even have used the patent they claimed was "pending" to stifle competition if someone created a similar app from scratch.
But now it belongs to all of us, and anyone with the expertise to set it up can run a pad server for his own writing circle or for the world. People might even hack in new features and share them, like that Wave Federation thing Iba mentioned in the blog post.
But even if EtherPad's codebase stays the same forever, it's ours now and we can use it however we want.
Small wonder they wanted to acquire AppJet to send its programmers to the Google Wave slave mines to make Wave work more like EtherPad. I'm tickled pink they went through with their pledge to open-source it, and did it so quickly.
Isn't it amazing? This is the code that was AppJet's entire revenue stream...and after Google bought them for ten million dollars, they're giving all that work away to the community, free.
You can argue all you want about whether Google is really evil or not, but either way it certainly has its non-evil moments.
Oddly enough, I just wrote a fairly lengthy review of Rainbows End over on TeleRead.org. Submitted it to Slashdot; it's still pending. (I'm not optimistic, but it was worth a try.) I talk some about the book, and about how Vernor Vinge's ideas for "the book of the future" have been evolving and changing since True Names.
It'll be fascinating if this technology actually starts to show up in real life.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, they're going to be layering Adobe's proprietary DRM on top of the ePub. So even if ePub is itself an open format, it's going to be contaminated by Adobe DRM. (There's still no way to read Adobe DRM'd books on the iPhone/iPod Touch, by the way, unless you crack them.)
I covered the FTC meeting for TeleRead.org (though since I'm connected right now through an iPod Touch from a hospital exam room I don't have any way to fetch the link).
I also was credited by name for a question asked at the beginning of the last panel. :)