Lessons To Learn From The OLPC Project

FixedSpelling writes "Whether you're impressed with it or not, the XO-1 could have a major impact on notebook design. The concept behind the OLPC's development brings outside-the-box thinking and cost-consciousness to a level that we rarely see in portable computing. There are a number of lessons that can be learned the from its unique design and we can already see that some of these concepts have been noticed by manufacturers. 'The biggest attraction to the OLPC project has always been the price of the system. You don't have to be a cynic to understand that the impact of a $100 notebook could be huge and the price has generated the majority of the interest in the project. Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better. The low price was originally important so that the XO-1 could be produced in large quantities without putting too much of a burden on the buyer but the low cost appeals to everyone.'"

Crank it up

I like the crank. If only I could power my laptop, cell phone, etc that way.

Re:Crank it up

Any women interested in charging it?

Only women interested in charging you would be interested in charging it if you get my drift.

here ya go

You might like some of the stuff these guys make [freeplayenergy.com], including a universal human powered charger for small gadgets. We have a couple of their things, the original crank and spring (clockwork) powered multiband radio, and a later, crank to generator model, excellent build quality there. The OLPC guys are still contemplating going with their foot pedal push generator thing, along with the yo yo string puller last I heard.

Re:Crank it up

It's intended to be able to charge other things through usb.

And the pullstring is better than a crank because you can put your foot through it and just keep tapping while you work.

Maybe they should have patented it all

And then used the money to lower the price. Not something I would personally do, but seems like a popular fad.

Re:Maybe they should have patented it all

Their actual plan is almost the exact opposite of this. By making all of the source code and designs available under a permissive license, they hope other people will start building them. If your country getting good use out of OLPC units? Build a factory to produce any new ones you need, employ local people, and get a workforce that's trained in laptop assembly, educational software development, and so on.

Re:Maybe they should have patented it all

There is a tremendous amount to patent, but I don't think the OLPC project owns the rights to most of it. Six hour battery life for active use, closer to 24 just using the screen in black and white to read. Pull the string for 1 minute and you get 10 minutes of use. The interface is totally different than anything I have ever used before. A tremendous amount of innovation went into these laptops, and whether I think the project will "succeed" or not, everyone who worked on this project has my respect.

How do you get one of these?

... and when will they be available for sale in the US?

Re:How do you get one of these?

You can buy two for $400 [xogiving.org] starting november 12th. One for you, one is donated to a 3rd world kid.

Re:How do you get one of these?

Correction: One is donated, if, and only if at least 5,000 people sign up for the deal.

Without any other committing statements contradicting this, I take it to mean that if 3,000 people sign up, they'll send out 3,000 very overpriced XO's to those who order, and the poor kids get no machines.

And no mention about who is going to pay for the infrastructure needed for the machines either, if they reach the 5,000 goal. Not only do they need a support apparatus, but the machines themselves need electricity (the crank never came out, and the other battery charging implements are still not in production, if they ever will be) and Internet (the applications on the XO are leased and have to be renewed over Internet every so often). Just handing out machines like it was bread won't do people any good.

"Notebooks break, they get lost, ...."

"Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently" By what percent of notebook users? This does not happen all the time in my universe. Unsupported generalizations in a submission make me want to mod the whole thread down.

my favorite lesson

The greatest lesson to be learned from this is that not everyone thinks that a super, ultra, mega, turbo powerful and equally as powerful processor is what they need. It was exactly what i was telling somebody at work today. If you are into playing games, rendering video, editing really hi-res photos, or doing music editing...need a REALLY powerful machine, with a LOT of ram (actually if you are doing any of these as your job, you should probably be using a mac). However, if you are like me, and your laptop is more or less a thin client that connects to other machines via either Remote Desktop or SSH, then the cheapest, most durable, lightest, and most efficient laptop is EXACTLY what you need.

If I could buy a pallet of these things and run rdesktop and OpenVPN on them, half of my users would be using them from home.
hell, $100 bucks is cheaper than my friggin blackberry! and i bet it doesn't get confused when you throw anything but txt based email at it!

Re:dude, shift your paradigms

Ah, intelligent debate. Beautiful.

The mac mafia can blow me. There's things that macs do well, and there's things that they don't. PC's can edit video too. We say macs are preferable because it is nicer to do on a mac. And just like you can run photoshop or premiere on a PC, you can run some games on a mac. If you go through more than two games in a year, however, and don't want to be specifically choosing them off a somewhat narrow mac compatibility list, XP is the 99.9% compatible platforms for games, macs (maybe) coming in as a distant second. Recommending a mac for gaming is bad religion-driven advice, aimed to cynically use your "geek" status to bolster the ranks of your religion rather than do good to whoever is being advised.

Now, back to the topic:
1. I *import and resell* miniITX and nanoITX kit. You're preaching to the quire. I know damn well what a supposedly "underpowered" box can do, be you running gentoo, OpenBSD, or even woe and behold, Vista.

2. UMPC's are still immature, especially and specifically the sub-400$ ones. I'm VERY MUCH looking to some ultracheap yet seriously expandable platforms and reasonably powered (a 1GHz C7 or an 800MHz dothan is VERY reasonable).

Thing is, one can get VERY cheap biggest and fastest:
[a] CF cards
[b] miniPCI wireless cards
[c] SODIMM RAM any size you care to want
[d] miniPCI Wireless cellular cards
on ebay.

I want UMPCs where you can plug a mountain of the above, plus a USIM.

Now, to my point:
I claim this is a FASLE STATEMENT: If average joe doesn't need power [gaming/video/other-crunching], one such UMPC is all he needs.
NOT the reasoning: because it has too little CPU/RAM/Disk (most can be upgraded most of the time anyway if he REALLY wants Vista)
The reasoning:
[a] Joe may not want to have a desktop monitor, may want to stay productive on the go, and may still want a humane resolution to be looking at. That spells bye-bye 8'' screen, bye-bye UMPC pricetag, aka bye-bye UMPC, enter 12'' ultraportables and bigger which spell what-we-already-have, and if you want SERIOUS resolution (Thinkpad X6* Tablet or Toshiba M200 do SXGA+), you have to cough up some serious dough.

Moral: SCREENS COST BIG MONEY, and are pro'lly the BIG influence behind the price drop from ultraportables to UMPCs.

[b] Joe may not want a one hour battery. Small UMPC form factor is nice and cute, but the power consumption of that redesigned-into-a-laptop miniITX or Intel rig is the same as what the bigger ultraportables (or bigger bricks) have. So you have to fit a battery, sized for bigger laptops, on this little thingamajig, to get reasonable off-the-grid time. They don't do that. They give you a smaller battery which lasts less. Joe may not want that.

[c] ... Multiple connectivity (without USB spaghetti hanging out of your machine?) Dual miniPCI slots? Do =400$ boxes have these?

When is the UMPC/"underpowered"-rig enough?
1. When used as a DTR, in conjunction with external substitutes for everything it lacks (USB, monitors..)
2. When used somewhere where resolution and battery are not a factor (Mediacenter PC can do just fine with 800x600. CarPC can do ok with 640x480).
3. When used to run samba, asterisk and rtorrent at home, or maybe pfSense, and all you need (^H^H^H^Hwant) is a console.

My Point: There's more offered by "Overpowered-coal-driven-battle-cruiser" laptops than what UMPCs can provide on more fronts than one, too many to make a one-size-fits-all proclamation that they're all Joe needs. That's a falsity. Circumstantially, it can sometimes be right, but it's not anywhere near a generic recommendation.

As always pending a recommendation, It can't be professionally answered without asking what the user actually needs, and that varies.

Re:dude, shift your paradigms

(I was GP, but switched to my coal-burner)

Yes: I agree that, if Joe Phishbait's going to have a computer he calls "home", it ain't gonna be some dinky thing with a tiny screen and a clumsy input device.

And, you are right that the current class of UMPCs suffers from poor design choices: they certainly sacrifice the wrong things, and leave other things the same. Putting a smaller battery in it may make a UMPC smaller and lighter, but it reduces its mobility. Using an operating system optimized for driving multiple screens and having multiple windows open at the same time, with lots of pretty animations and effects and a huge memory footprint, may not be the best choice for a handheld device.

But those are two separate issues. Whoever started this is absolutely wrong about the utility of a super-cheap super-portable, insofar as it can replace a "base computer". But, on the other hand, he's right that they can do a lot of the basic tasks, and add portability to the mix. And, for most people, they will fill a need. You know, like a computer in the kitchen.

However, I think you've lost the pack with your need for expandibility. Joe ain't following you there. As you point out, we need to consider the purpose before we select the device. The form of a house is not bricks and wood arranged in a certain manner, but the purpose of providing protection from the elements. Likewise, if you design an UMPC as a low-power CPU, some memory, and a miniPCI-slots stuck inside a small box, you'll end up with today's crop of $1000 one-hour wonders.

The paradigm shift I'm seeing is that we're seeing a new use for computers emerging. Originally, computers were described as a "Lean-forward" system -- games, editing, word processing, whatever, you sat in an upright chair, and leaned in, actively engaged in the thing. Then, with the increase in power, we saw "Lean-back" uses: television (now streaming video), music, and so on. People can sit on couches now, and we're seeing PCs being hooked directly to televisions and running through them. The networking builds up and we see WLANs, mediaservers, and all kinds of cool stuff being used by everybody. But effectively, the same PC can serve as a both a "Lean-forward" and "Lean-back" device: just put a couch behind that office chair. The emergent use I'm seeing gets rid of all this "lean" nonsense altogether: it's the computer you use when you're doing a task that doesn't require constant or intensive interaction with the computer. And many people use their computers this way.

Having the internet on the conference table (among a pile of papers) for easy consultation of reference sources is a tremendous time saver. Need to look something up? grab the tablet and do it. Want to show it to someone else? Pass it around. Want to talk for hours to loved ones in a different country? put the thing in your pocket and go. Out hiking and curious what's over that ridge? bring up the satellite pictures and take a look for yourself. Need to write down detailed notes/instructions in a remote location? unfold the keyboard and go.

In theory, the by the (now $300 with memory cards) n800 can do these things, and if the thing fully worked in practice (aka, if it were not "immature"), it would serve these uses better than a $1000 UMPC or laptop. Battery life largely depends on how long you power the screen: with the screen running, it gives you about four hours (still too short, give me a bigger battery, dammit).

So these devices aren't working yet, and the price is still too high, but when they work, and when they cost around $200 (maybe a third-generation Eee, or a fourth-generation n770, or whatever MontaVista cooks up), they're gonna take up a place alongside desktop and laptop PCs.

But you knew that already.

Re:dude, shift your paradigms

Well, unless it's a reference to the quire (from the Latin quaternion, originally referring to a gathering of four bifolia, as apposed to a quinternion with five or sexternion with six, now taken by synechdoche to refer to any single gathering of pages; cf. the French cahier) the priest has in front of him, containing his sermon. In that case, I wouldn't be addressing a friendly audience, but rather replying to his post with the substance of his post.

Of course, "preaching to the choir" is the cliche', while "preaching to the quire" would be a novel usage. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Come to think of it, I'm gonna steal "preaching to the quire" for an article on the relationship between oral and written sermons in the XIVth century. Thanks again!

very few people DO any of that whizbang stuff

Most people use the web, send email, and word process. I know it's common in Slashdot to talk about your week-long 3D rendering sessions, but the number of people who do that is extremely small. Seriously, I spent some years visiting houses and fixing computers and maybe one person in all those people did stuff with video. I told him to upgrade his RAM from 256 to 512. The point is that one of these basic laptops is ideal for what people really do with their computers, and hardware bloat is just as serious as software bloat (because it makes irrational demands on batteries and heat disposal). Hell, 99% of what I do with a PC can be done on an OLPC. On a related note, Vista was created mostly to give Americans a distorted picture of the hardware they needed to live out their pathetic computational lives, lives that would be satisfied on a Pentium MMX running Windows 98.

One thing I learned ...

That due to the economics of inflation a $100 laptop really costs $200.

computers in education, smalltalk

What I love the most about the OLPC is the key that lets you show the source code (in python!) of the app in use. Which you can modify. and if you mess it up, revert. I'm astonished to see this concept from smalltalk and Alan Kay live on. It couldn't be a better idea. We were having a discussion in a strategy session at my daughters' small montessori school (which goes thru 6th grade), where we were bemoaning the lack of imaginative uses of technology in the classrooms. Beyond a student-produced newsletter and using word processors to write reports... nothing. Nobody seems to know what to do. But the OLPC is taking the lead in saying kids can and should be allowed to do so much more - the mere fact that here you are given a facility to modify your complex tools should be revolutionary.

Re:computers in education, smalltalk

What I love from the specs of the OLPC is the cranking recharging, and networking abilities. From a civil engineer's perspective, it's great for lots of field tasks where you may want to syncronize the compilation of guys working in different ends of the field, while at the same time giving them the ability to keep the device working with occasional cranking ups when the battery is dead and it is not practical to go running back and forth to the truck for recharging. It's ideal for civil engineering field work where you spend 12 hour shifts on site.... Add to it solar cells in ADDITION to the crank and it's wonderful. There are many tasks where you don't need the ultra PC. But the ability to turn into a TABLET added to those other features that I mentioned make it an ideal field computer.

An important lesson:

If it's too cheap to be true, it probably is.

Are you going to try the twofer offer?

I'm seriously thinking about it. It's possible that the machine will be so nice that I'll use it for my regular light duty stuff (email and basic surfing). Given the current state of the Internet, I actually feel like it's less likely that the donated machine will help the target kid, but it's supposed to be the thought that counts, eh?

However, I wish the twofer offer had a provision for donating the second machine if it's too far from tolerable for my uses. I can afford to donate the 400 bucks to charity...

File the OLPC as TNBT under old news..

"Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better."

They also represent a dieing phase of mobile-hardware evolution.

By the time OLPC positives coalesce, apps & data for the masses will all be ubiquitously net-available, meaning anything more than a terminal will be/is outdated.

Of course, the OLPC is still a viable tool for the left-behinds.

Re:File the OLPC as TNBT under old news..

I do not get this "apps as services" dream so many have. At all.

I like being able to write a school report on the bus home at weekends. I like being able to mess with my photos at my parent's rural house which only has dial-up. I like having tens of useful little apps locally, just for when I need them. I like not being beholden to some companies server for access to vital data, and I'm sure many here agree with me - for every program that uses an open standard, 2 more use their own. At least now if Apple stops making Pages, I can export to txt, or docx, or whatever I need to keep working. Some server goes down? Then perhaps I get notice, export to another format. Maybe I can't, or maybe the crash happens at an inopportune time - "Sorry that you need to finish your presentation today, we'll be back up soon"...

For a look at how people react to software as a service. Apple releases iPhone, all non-standard apps as services. Internet goes crazy, hacks emerge, major sites lambast Apple for screwing customers. And this was a phone! Can you imagine if someone releases a laptop that needs a net connection to ensure basic functionality!

Finally the bandwidth costs would surely destroy a whole lot of popular non-commercial programs. Think to who promotes this idea at all - big companies like Microsoft, Adobe. They can afford (and charge for) online apps. The GIMP? OpenOffice? How long would donations keep these projects alive if people were constantly streaming data from their sites?

So, if local applications, with no latency, fast HD access, and true control of my data are "for the left-behinds", then consider me left behind, and happy with it.

Two things I liked

Were the day glow green color and, in the original specs, the hand crank. I wanted to take notes on my bright green notebook during one of those interminable sales demos, then right in the middle plug in my hand crank and charge up my laptop. Sorry, just charging up, go right on.

Then they took the hand crank out of the design and my whole sales demo interrupt fantasy just fell apart. But by that time I was already hooked on the idea of cheap laptop with built-in mesh networking.

I think I'd use the less powerful and more portable laptop more than a power brick that costs $3,000.00. If it linked in to my desktop when in range, all the better.

Too bad about the hand crank, though.

The $175 Laptop

I may just be pulling the exact number out of my ass, but I thought it stopped being the $100 laptop and became the $175 laptop a while ago. Why are people still calling it the $100 laptop?

Power & display

The two things I like best about the OLPC are:

• The battery that lasts for 24 hours
• The tablet screen that gets 200dpi and is readable in direct sunlight

Re:Power & display

Laser printers print at 600dpi and above, but you don't need a magnifying glass to read the output. The point is that the size of a character on-screen should not depend on the dpi of the display. If the GUI is properly designed, the fonts will be large enough and the high pixel density will allow the fonts to be smoother.

All of this could be ripped off...

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home [laptop.org]

OLPC espouses five core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and ***(5) free and open source.***

Someone else can run with option 5, to make an equivalent, for adults laptop. Depending on performance, we may finally see a machine mass-produced, showing acceptable speed and avertising that it's doing so despite "under-powered" hardware.

If this was mass-produced, people would finally have reason to question: why do I need this super-great/expensive machine for the latest OS? Sure we have plenty of tiny OSes out there, Puppy Linux, D*** Small Linux and various others from scratch. The problem is the same that kept Linux from the spotlight... it's not pre-installed on PCs sitting on store shelves.

(Sure the above efficiency question is asked frequently from one version of Windows to the next, but default installs of Linux flavors trying to be mainstream-ready are a bit slow on older hardware as well.)

I can't wait to see the results on the marketplace...

Standard Laptop Cases, Please!

What's needed are some standard laptop cases, so components of standard sizes can be used to build systems. Use something like a PC-104 design with flat connectors, so you can choose whether to add a more powerful graphics card or something else. Have a DVD drive sized area where you can choose whether you need a DVD drive, more hard drives, more batteries. There obviously will be a need for several different sizes due to various portability-vs-power needs, but there can be more flexibility for machines...and more competition.

the lesson is: you probably don't need a laptop.

Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better.

No. The more reason to drop the laptop fetish. Laptops absolutely have their appropriate uses- but desktops work just fine for a huge percentage of people. Their components are cheaper, more easily replaced, and usually superior in performance. Nevermind that forcing you to sit in front of the computer, as opposed to being available to you in bed, on your couch, on your porch, etc- means you're more prone to wasting more time on the internet.

Yet...very few people I know will even consider a desktop. It drives me insane in business settings- I can do all manner of repairs and data recovery very, very easily on a desktop. Laptops are a total mixed bag ranging from "the company will have a tech here tomorrow morning" to "ARRRRG its going to take an hour to get the damn thing apart."

Thinkpads and Dells are the best, from my experience; HP sells a lot of consumer-ish crap. Apple gets a failing grade in almost every regard; iBooks, Powerbooks, and Macbook Pros are MISERABLE to disassemble for hard drive replacement. iBooks require damn near COMPLETE disassembly to get to the drive. The only plus is firewire target disk mode, but that is near useless in case of hardware failure.

Going to a conference

My local LUG is having a large conference tomorrow, where one of the highlights is an introduction to programming on the OLPC.

At least in Argentina, where a deployment is being scheduled, the entire Free Software community has the hots for this. Whether it succeeds or not as en educational tool, it's pioneering a new paradigm of computing; the truly small, truly cheap, truly rugged laptop.

OLPC system images

Here's something that might interest those who are thinking about the $400 two-fer, but want to play with XO first...

You can emulate most of it with qemu or vmware. It's easy.

    See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Quick_Start [laptop.org]

Seemed a pretty sluggish on my wimpy Core Duo 1.66, but lots of that may be due to a lack of hardware accelerated video in qemu.

Anyhow, check it out. Good times.

(It does seem odd to use Python as the primary language on a slow CPU with little memory, but it seems to work okay...)

Wireless Mesh Network!

The wireless mesh networking capability will be awesome! I'm in the US, if all my neighbors had wireless mesh networking, low power, and open then there would always be a network connection available. It would also be free. The users would create their own internet.

Industrial PDA's

Could probably sell thousands per year as rugged, portable laptops for field service techs.

Serious question:

Why are they using x86? ARM or SHx are both much more power efficient, work with linux (and get more done per clock cycle). Did AMD give them a good deal on low end chips they couldn't get rid of?

Re:Serious question:

ARM or SHx are both much more power efficient, work with linux (and get more done per clock cycle)

NO, YES, and NO respectively.

ARM and SH are both very low power, but that is entirely at the expense of performance. A good trade-off for embedded systems that don't need much processing power, but certainly not for multimedia applications. As soon as you start trying to do floating point calculations, watch your ARM/SH CPU grind to a halt. They certainly do less per clock than even older x86 CPUs, and are a long way behind fairly modern x86 CPUs like the Geode. That goes double for Intel's clock-inflated XScale CPUs, pushing 1GHz.

Oh dear $100 is a lot of money

From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry of India has rejected Nicholas Negroponte's offer of $100 laptops for schoolchildren. The Ministry has stated plans to make laptops at $10 for schoolchildren.

Consider the average annual income in those countries is usually less than $1000, unless one day we can make it under $10, I don't see how it can be affordable. As for western consumers who are looking for light-weight/cheaper alternatives, a 2nd hand laptop from ebay will usually does the job, and cost well under $200.

How stupid can people here be?

I have now seen a load of comments along the lines of "you can get a cheap Walmart laptop for $400" and it's so much better.

No, it is not better. It does have more RAM, a faster CPU and a larger disk. However, it does not have a 24 hour battery life, the ability to run without a mains supply, a rugged design that will allow it to last a long time in a tough environment or a screen which will work in direct sunlight. It also doesn't generare oits of heat, so it doesn't need one of those awful laptop CPU fans which are so unreliable on low end machines.

So yeah, you get lower speed specs, but you get other much higher specs instead. And it's still 1/4 of the price or 1/3 or whatever the price ends up being.

So, no that $400 Dell is not even nearly equivalent. Come to think of it that $4000 Dell isn't equivalent either. Something with that portability, ruggedness and battery life would be vastly more useful to a lot of people than a high end, high power, fragile and very expensive computer.

Remember, a computer is more than just the CPU speed.

Terrible Name

I've been complaining about the name for a while now.

The purpose of the project is to change the learning model of disadvantaged children via novel purpose-built and Free software and revolutionary hardware (mesh computing, heaps of work done on the power side of things).

So then they call it "one laptop per child" and the tech media starts comparing it to PC laptops that people use for entirely different purposes. The casual observer / tech writer goes "laptops... like word processing and games and stuff? 3rd world children don't need that, they need food and infrastructure!".

Also it's been tagged "the $100 laptop", which once again causes people to compare it to consumer laptops and start whining when the price estimate changes.

So yeah - almost all of the writing I read about this wonderful technology Completely Misses The Point, stemming from a terrible choice of name.

what about global warming

If these laptops are so cheap, and available to everyone, people won't mind buying them in massive amounts.
This will generate a huge heap of trash.

Funny, the article doesn't talk about the display

Having a black-white high DPI mode, readable outside, is quite a useful innovative feature, in my book, with the low power consumption the laptop can be used as an e-book reader.

I wonder if laptops makers will license the display and scale it to 14" to sell in regular laptops? Probably not though as they're doing very little innovation.

Of course having a great product is not enough to be a great success..

there's one left to learn

So the biggest problem with it is this: kids in the third world don't have a lot and the concept of sharing is widely-practiced - ONE LAPTOP PER CLASS is plenty! Why OLPC is intent on giving EVERY child a laptop is indeed, very misguided and just reflects US consumerist values.

And the collaboration features??

Nice article. Overall a pretty good summary of the new features of the OLPC laptop. One feature however is missing (and missing from most stories about the OLPC laptop), and that is the collaboration model and the corresponding user interface. Probably we are so used to the clunky ways we do collaboration on our PC's that we completely mis the revolutionary aspects of this new sharing model and the user interface that makes sharing the easiest thing in the world to do. It is build into the software, just a mouse click to share your document with your friends (visualized on the screen). No big iron groupware servers, just one mechanism for sharing instead of the dozens of primitive and incompatible methods we use now. I hope that this aspect of the laptop will get more attention. And maybe the open source community cab develop this in to a new killer app for Linux.

Good Engineering

Reminds me of the Nicklaus Wirth work years ago when his group was designing 50 W workstations.

It once took a big room and air conditioning...

to hold and make operational a computer that is far less powerful than any lapop being built today, including the OLPC.

Tomorrow you will have throw away laptops. just as today you have throw away calculators.

The point is, with or without the OLPC and competitive efforts along the same line, $100 laptops and even sub $100 laptops will happen.

The question is timing. When they do happen will it be to help fill a poor countries needs or post poor?

To me poor is qualified as having need of something more vital to survival such as food, clothing, shelter, medicine, basic education, etc... then it is to spend it on a computer.

And when the income raises enough to buy such a computer, how is what such a computer is capable of, going to benefit someone living in such a poor environment.

Just at what level of poor does such a computer become viable to have?

Before that level is reached I can understand having a common share of computers, such as like books recycled in a class room, own by the school...? etc...

Unfortunate lesson in pricing

One unfortunate lesson that the OLPC team should have learned is that you shouldn't promise a $100 laptop unless you're sure that you can DELIVER a $100 laptop. Now that it costs twice as much as originally promised, many of the third world countries who were wanted to buy OLPC's aren't interested anymore and are looking at alternatives from other hardware manufacturers.

I know that's a tough lesson to learn, but it is the unfortunate truth.

Notebooks get lost...

"Notebooks break, they get lost, and they are replaced frequently, so the cheaper, the better."

I've never had a notebook "get lost", but I guess if they become cheap enough people will lose them more often as they'll be less careful with them. But if a notebook does "get lost", the price of the hardware is the least of your concerns. The data that's on the notebook falling into the wrong hands is a much greater concern, and that has no relation to the price of the computer.

BitFrost

I'm surprised it hasn't come up yet.

BitFrost (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost [laptop.org]) is the set of security mechanisms present in the OLPC.

Though I certainly wouldn't care to summarize the entire thing, here's what it comes down to.

User programs don't automatically get the running user's full rights. A calculator has no reason to delete your documents, so why should it be able to? And without your knowledge to boot. On the OLPCs, documents are kept in a special storage area. It isn't a matter of owner read access. In general, for a program to get a user's file poofed in to its chroot sandbox, it has to ask the document service (which presents a consistent dialog). Further, a text editor doesn't need to access the network. The user can access the network, but his or her programs can only do so if explicitly allowed to (various such rights are set at install time, configurable later). Certain combinations of program rights are disallowed at install time (such as both network access and webcam access) but can be enabled later. Plus a lot more.

Sudo/UAC sound nice and all until you realize that programs and users are separate entities.

Yes, there's a lot to learn from the OLPC project. It's designed to be used (safely) by computer-illiterate children who can't (or can scarcely) read. If you think that sounds like a good description of computer users in general, then you're absolutely right. Security as seen in *nix and Windows makes perfect sense for protecting users from each other. That was the goal back in the day. The people with access to a server were supposed to have a general idea of what they were doing (entirely on them if they didn't), and in that case *nix security works well. But computers have gotten more personal, and that assumption is now blatantly false. Anyone thinkng that Windows security problems stop at buffer overflows, or that Linux on the desktop will change anything, is a fool.

Re:first post

wtf is an olpc?

Well if you don't want to RTFA, or search google, or wikipedia: Its One Laptop Per Child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olpc [wikipedia.org]

Re:first post

But basic editing means [...] It took a second or to.

Right.

-b

Re:One ? per child?

I find it ironic that the OLPC project is always regarded with such high praise, while any mention of a school district investing in laptops is always met with disdain and remarks such as "why does a kid need a laptop anyway? He'll just break it/lose it/trade it for drugs".

Re:One ? per child?

To me, sounds like they just went with tech-jargon-BS and said that the computer is the best way to move to a better education.

I must of missed it, can you show me where they say a computer is the best way to improve education?

If all the money they spent, and want to spend, on 3rd-world education went to just.. um... BOOKS, then they would have probably accomplished twice their goal by now.

Text books in the Third World are expensive, especially when they have to be replace yearly do to editing of corrections and updating them. With a net connection an e-book on a laptop these can easily, quickly, and cheaply. A child have even be able to carry a number of e-books on one XO, then when they finish one class the text used can be placed with new text. Then you can have not just one BOOK but a bunch of BOOKS.

Falcon

e-books

I've seen very few textbooks released in e-book format; most of the ones I have seen were in very specialized subjects and released under the GNU FDL.

Do you live in the Third World? They are most useful there, however they are used elsewhere. U Penn [upenn.edu] list more than 25,000 e-books. The University of Texas [utexas.edu] lists more. Those are just the first 2 results of a Google of e-books "text books" [google.com], which lists almost 25,000 results. Of the XO ZDNet" [zdnet.com] has this to say:

"Assuming this device can survive its harsh environment and continue to function over a period of a half-dozen or more years (still a stretch, in my estimation), a single lightweight (but rugged) device, could easily outlast 100 textbooks in a hot and humid environment. And, by any measure, a $100 laptop equipped with 100 electronic textbooks could be worth its weight in gold in such a third-world setting."

Falcon

Re:But they aren't $100 genius

Why is he modded as troll? The summary says they're $100 and he's pointing out they're not, even in Uruguay. Look, he cites a source and everything.

Re:But they aren't $100 genius

I figured that the lesson learned from the $100 laptop was how to get other of people to pay for your commercial R&D while praising you for being a humanitarian by claiming that your product will be much cheaper than is realistic, claiming that you are doing if for charity, and maybe selling a few thousand at cost when you get it far enough along to be manufactured.

This project is a scam. If the goal is to teach kids about computers, there are much cheaper, and far more durable ways to do it. I can't find it know, but when the "$100" PC was first announced, I went out and priced what it would cost to build a PC based around a C64 as a core, and I could get the parts RETAIL in single unit prices for ~$90. The only thing that was not included was the wireless networking, but it did include the hand crank, as the DTV (C64) runs off of 4 AA batteries. It shouldn't be that hard to generate 6 volts with a hand crank.

Re:Oh, come now

Wouldn't you rather pay $2,000 to have your $100 laptop sent to a special clean room facility to recover the data?

How exactly does that work on flash-based storage?

Very profitably, actually. Why do you ask?

Of course not!

I'd rather back up! Duh!

Or just leave everything on network storage, and use the laptop as a dumb terminal!

It's not rocket surgery, people!

(Well, ok, it might be for Joe User...)