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."

Touchscreen this, multitouch that...

[GrumblyStuff]

STOP TOUCHING MY MONITOR.

Yes, caps are like yelling. That was my intention.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Darkness404]

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?

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then give them real computers and not toys.

How many

[tsa]

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?

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Khyber]

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Shit that's outdated compared to today's watches put our ass into space.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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Darkness404]

...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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[sznupi]

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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Darkness404]

"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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[iamwahoo2]

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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[LingNoi]

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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Darkness404]

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?

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Books? Paper, Pencils, Teachers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always disagreed with this project. I think there is so much more to learn using books, paper, pencils and good teachers.
The whole project is very misguided. All you're going to teach those kids to do is use technology that the rest of their country can't afford anyway, so as soon as it breaks they will have lost any gain they had. /grumble grumble

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

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.

Re:Books? Paper, Pencils, Teachers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw it that way until I realized that they were giving a Hitchhiker's Guide to the people who were most in need. They each have the sum total of all human knowledge. So kids in developing countries would be able to go as far with that as they wanted.

Worth a shot, no?

All The Cool features?

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to all the cool features?

Like mesh networking , solar panel, hand crank.

And all the kids in the small African Villages creating a huge network of knowledge?

And didn't they move to MS Windows for these things?

I thought that the humanitarian OLPC was dead?

Re:Books? Paper, Pencils, Teachers?

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Patent Problems?

[adbge]

I think OLPC could've cut out the fat and made it run decently...

OLPC would not be able to cut out the fat and make OSX run decently due to its proprietary nature. Presumably, OLPC chose OSS for the ability to modify the OS to conform to their systems' capabilities, which would simply not be possible on OSX. I'm intensely skeptical of the idea that Steve Jobs would ever offer to license OSX to run on hardware that they did not control.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[cgenman]

The OLPC is easily thousands of times as powerful as your first computer.

Re:Patent Problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe any offer was based on the knowledge that the answer would be no for the reasons you state - it does a company no harm to make a generous offer to a charitable cause when they know they'll never have to go through with their part of the deal...

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, people were building wells and using organic fertilisers for hundreds of years, even in the west, before formal education came along. You might not be able to do a precision job but that doesn't mean there aren't simple rules of thumb you can use instead to do an effective job. And nobody's suggesting that these should replace teachers, the OLPC project tends to only work in areas where the importance of education is already recognised, and in those access to information can be an etremely valuable resource. This trendy "they need teachers more than they need laptops" argument is just as bad as the attitudes you are criticising, because it also demonstrates that you think you have the right answers when perhaps you don't and OLPC can make a difference.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[TheRaven64]

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?

Re:I'd just like to interject.

[TheRaven64]

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 [informit.com].

Re:How many

[TheRaven64]

Depends on how you measure success. It achieved a lot more than not doing it would have achieved. It achieved a lot less than their goals. With a project like this, I don't think you can really measure its success meaningfully in any time period shorter than a decade, and probably two.

Re:Books? Paper, Pencils, Teachers?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Totenglocke]

.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.

Re:Patent Problems?

[gig]

> OLPC would not be able to cut out the fat and make OSX run decently due to its proprietary nature

Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. The only difference between Mac OS and iOS is the user and application interfaces. One is mouse and one is multitouch. The bottom 3/4 are the same. The xnu kernel runs on iPod and Xserve and everything in-between. Yes it runs great on ARM 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. It ran great on PowerPC G4 500MHz. Secondly, the core of OS X is open source. OLPC could easily see what is going on there. Third, OLPC uses fucking Windows. They shipped fucking Windows. That is fat and proprietary. So the idealistic notion of Sugar is just an idealistic notion. By any measure, free OS X is better than cheap Windows.

 

Re:Let them eat laptops!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the typical stupid romantic spoiled middle-class girls got home-sick and subverted all her "beliefs". If you have more of these friends, please advise them to stay at home. It's a tough world without hair stylists out there.

Setting my indignation aside, my reasoning for concluding your friend is an imbecile brat is as follows: if I am to believe you, she apparently was quick to convert her bad experience into a vile generalization in the form of "anti-immigrant sentiments"; she directed her laments towards the behavior of those she was there to "help", excusing herself from attempting to contextualize the problems she found in cultural and historical issues; she blames the recipients of her aid for her incompetent approach of "treating the symptoms, and not the illness".