OLPC to Run Windows, Come to the US 350
An anonymous reader writes "'Yesterday Nicholas Negroponte, former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and current head of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, gave analysts and journalists an update on the OLPC project. Two big changes were announced — the $100 OLPC is now the $175 OLPC, and it will be able to run Windows. Even in a market where there are alternatives to using Windows and Office, there's a huge demand for Microsoft software. The OLPC was seen as a way for open source Linux distributions to achieve massive exposure in developing countries, but now Negroponte says that the OLPC machine will be able to run Windows as well as Linux. Details are sketchy but Negroponte did confirm that the XO's developers have been working with Microsoft to get the OLPC up to spec for Windows.' We also find out that the OLPC gets a price hike and will officially come to the US. Could this be tied into Microsoft's new $3 Windows XP Starter and Office 2007 bundle? Now that the OLPC and Intel's Classmate PC can both run Windows, is Linux in the developing world in trouble?"
Re:Instant solution (Score:3, Informative)
Windows NT started on the Alpha processors, later was ported to x86. In recent years it was ported to x64 and Itanium (Itanium share nothing with x86 except the company that made them).
Don't invent problems where there aren't.
The death of Linux on OLPC is greatly exaggerated (Score:5, Informative)
True: Microsoft is working on a Windows based system that can be executed on the OLPC laptop.
False: There is no strategy change. The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages.
Re:Not News (Score:5, Informative)
What about Windows CE? (Score:2, Informative)
Congratulations (Score:4, Informative)
I live in a third world country, let me say this: 175 $us is too expensive, that 75% more actually means a reduction in possible buyers by 90% (Although this statistic is totally made up, I am pretty sure this is the case, let's say 85%~95%), as a matter of fact, here it is possible to get a 'real' computer (Pentium I, which is enough for a child's computer, did you know?) for 150$us.
And all of this so it can run windows...
Technically, no (Score:5, Informative)
Several users of both systems (including my own experience) tends to show that Windows comes up with a desktop earlier than Linux. But once there the disk is still trashing for some time. Whereas on Linux, once you're logger, you're logged and everything is ready to run.
The whole stuff is build on windows to give you the impression that it is faster.
Re:Not News (Score:5, Informative)
So as often happens, the story is more sensationalist than anything else.
Re:Why 256Mb? (Score:4, Informative)
Also most of the applications are more or less custom, designed or modified to save on RAM and CPU time. Windows XP...could be, but I somehow doubt it would be that easy. If they said it was based on Windows Mobile, I'd be less skeptical.
Re:Congratulations (Score:2, Informative)
They estimate 25% reduction per year. That meanst that within 2 years they get it down to 100$
Don't underestimate Microsoft's warchest (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe you wouldn't bother. But Microsoft would.
If they have enough money to laugh at EU's face and keep paying their fine instead of opening their standards, they can afford paying for the whole development, then paying for the rights on the BIOS and the drivers, and then bundle them together with the Windows Starter+Office package for a couple of dollars.
They can even pay some people in their R&D department to make sure that the whole thing can actually work (won't be too much sluggish, as opposed to boots up and is useless beyond playing around with the GUI. Not BUG-free), and that it'll be an affordable alternative to Sugar.
But people in developing countries can't buy Dells. They would be interested in OLPCs.
And microsoft can't lose the opportunity to hook them on the MS Crack while those countries are still young.
Also, *maybe* the OLPC will be sold to occidental countries (maybe at a higher price, to help lowering the cost for developing countries). In which case, it's critical for MS to be sure that occidental kids are exposed to Microsoft products first.
Given the market share implication, there's a high probability that MS will throw some money at the problem.
Re:Why 256Mb? (Score:3, Informative)
This question has been asked and answered in their wiki [laptop.org].
I have been asking this myself. Why not? I once met someone who did exactly this. He organized a group in his church to collect and recycle old computers and give lessons to school dropouts in poor neighborhoods.
However, as the wiki I linked above says, it doesn't scale well. To organize a large scale effort in this way you would need a network of people with talent for organization, technical ability, and interest for helping the needy. It's not easy to find enough people with all of those qualifications.
old news, not a big deal (Score:2, Informative)
The first time I heard about this was after Bill Gates (and the intel ceo) blasted the OLPC project. After a quick google, here is an article from a year ago about the subject:0 .html [windowsfordevices.com]
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS261936762
Negroponte's publicly challenged the criticisms, reminding Gates and Intel that this is NOT a consumer machine. "We're going to help them make a Win CE version, so geez, why criticize me?"
Second, in response to complaints about the price, they have said for a long time that the $100 price point is the eventual goal, not the initial cost. From http://www.olpcnews.com/prototypes/olpc/olpc_xo_10 0_dollar_laptop.html [olpcnews.com]
"The project's operators say the price should fall to $100 apiece next year, when they hope to produce 50 million of the so-called "XO" machines, before dipping below $100 by 2010 when they aim to reach 150 million of the world's poorest children.
"We're pledging to always drive the price down," Walter Bender, the group's president of software and content, told Reuters. "Rather than continuing to add features to keep the price inflated, we're keeping the feature set stable and driving the price down.""
Re:Why 256Mb? (Score:3, Informative)
So, I wouldn't rule out Windows Mobile as a contender for this. More likely Microsoft would want to include an embedded limited-functionality Windows Vista to prime the market for Windows in developing nations, and that could very well be where the extra $75 in cost is going. I'd rather see Linux on the OLPC to expose people to an OS which does not restrict one's computing freedom, and to increase support and marker share of Linux, but that's just me. Microsoft is plenty persuasive and I'm sure it will ultimately ship with SOME Windows variant, since what Microsoft wants, Microsoft gets.
Re:Wow... No OS X? (Score:4, Informative)
In the great Slashdot tradition, I didn't read the article, but I got the impression that the OLPC will still be preinstalled with the tailor-made Linux distro. The ability to install Windows or whatever OS doesn't preclude this.
Re:Why 256Mb? (Score:3, Informative)
that honour i think many would agree would fall to psion (at least for anybody who has ever used one). portable. ran for a week on aa batteries. incredibly useful.
in the early 90s here in ireland and the uk i think every accountant and architect (plus a lot of docters) seemed to have one. whenever they released a new one they fetched premium prices as people bidded to get there hands on one. it handled out of the box spreadsheets, word processing and had a built in programming language opl. pure genius.
however as with many things victory does not favour the best. windows desktops for everybody?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_PLC [wikipedia.org]
i love that the article above mention that they got out as they faced competition from keyboardless rivals when now more and more devices are going back to keyboards. of all the portable keyboards that i have used the best is still the psion 3a.
on the plus side the software they created ended up as symbian in 100m phones so it's not all bad.
today my psion 5 has been replaced by a nokia e61. not perfect but still a damn sight better than any windows device i've tried.
Re:The death of Linux on OLPC is greatly exaggerat (Score:3, Informative)
Yes it does. The OLPC doesn't have a hard drive, and so, no swap partition to offload less recently used data, when you're getting low on RAM. Get a few apps running at once, especially with a memory-heavy, interpreted language like Python, and your 128MB of RAM will be full in no time, and applications will start crashing.
Re:Why 256Mb? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but you, no doubt, have a swap partition when RAM gets full. If you were running off of a small amount of Flash storage instead, you'd have real problems.
Not to mention that the power requirements for your laptop is more than an order of magnitude higher than the OLPC, and yet you probably don't have a WiFi router card in your notebook.
Re:Why 256Mb? (Score:4, Informative)
PalmOS was a panacea compared to the horrific WinCE, which was the competition at the time.
However, Windows was not the first, by a hell of a long shot. Psion was there in the earliest days, with an operating system that Windows Mobile still can't match, to this day. Hell, I would be willing to use Psion's operating system on my desktop if I could... Palm and Microsoft are both still putting out crap that needs a desktop system to accomplish anything... A decade ago, it was even worse. Yet back then on my handheld Psion, I was doing research via the web, typing entire research papers, inserting graphics, spreadsheets, charts/tables/graphs, and printing it out directly to any available printer via IR, etc.
It worked wonderfully, despite the fact that it had over a month of battery life on 2AA batteries (rechargeables in my case), and with a mere 25MHz CPU it was still far more responsive than any of the 200MHz+ systems with WinCE (or later PalmOS machines).