OLPC Halves Power Consumption For XO 1.75 160
angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has reduced the price of the next version of its notebook to US$165 and power consumption has been slashed by half compared to the previous version. The XO-1.75, with its 8.9-inch touchscreen, will start shipping in the second quarter of this year."
Courtesy of ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
it's about time (Score:4, Interesting)
LoB
prehistory meets postmodernity (Score:5, Interesting)
On the one hand, this article makes a clear case that there will be children in Chad mindlessly turning a crank for one hour and 47 minutes in order to do their homework for the night.
Yet on the other hand, these kids have orders of magnitude more computing horsepower than I did as a Reagan-era high school kid in an upper middle class community. Hard to know who should envy who.
Decentralize the technology (Score:3, Interesting)
The main problem with the OLPC, the one thing that made the project open to subversion by companies like Intel and Microsoft, is its centralized model of development. You get the laptops or tablets from one source, say, the central government of the country that buys into the idea or some buy-one/donate-the-other scheme. I understand that it's supposed to be more of an educational than a computing project. But this set-up generates dependency. What happens when the machines are damaged? More importantly, what happens to the next batch of children without laptops? Since the machines are manufactured in the usual Asian places (hint: two countries claiming the same name), this will likely result in a foreign exchange outflow from a country that can least afford it, as certain essential non-technological items (e.g. food and basic medicine) may need to take priority.
What the OLPC should have set out to develop is a RepRap [reprap.org]-like infrastructure that will allow the adults (or even older children) of the community that takes part in the project to manufacture the laptops by themselves from cheap, readily available components. If this isn't 100% possible, then give them at least enough transfer of technology to allow them to build the least technological parts, like the case or the keyboard. Think of a laptop case made out of recycled plastic or hard laminated cardboard. Then again, how far off is the day when we can run a desktop OS on an Arduino [arduino.cc] board?
Don't just give them fish. Teach them how to fish.
Computers made using such technology might appear crude at first, but not much cruder than the devices that ushered in the PC revolution.
OLPC revolutionized Laptops - time to do it again? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never thought I'd be a beneficiary from the OLPC project. I'd never be able to use an OLPC for anything I do. But I love how the project has put a bent in the technical landscape of portable devices industry. It was a failure as an education project perhaps, but it succeeded in more than one way as a laptop research project.
When OLPC came out in 2007, the laptops were on a lap-melting, back-breaking rush towards bigger & faster. Nearly everything came in with a Core2 or a Core2 Duo, with lots of RAM (yeah, guess what you can't save power on, RAM needs a strobe whether it has data or not). The fact that OLPC came out in 2007, sort of forced the geeks to look at weight as a valid concern for a consumer device. Not to mention questions about why a 1995 top-end laptop ran for 4 hours on batteries, when a 2005 one won't do the same at the same weight.
Less than a year after OLPC came the rush of netbooks. Finally machines that people can afford to buy (like here in India) and carry around without being tied to a wall plug. Scroll paste a few years, it is not only consumers, using them. I see Rasmus [lerdorf.com] post PHP benchmarks off his netbook, I see entire teams (like Inkscape) suddenly sit up and re-work their UI workflows/dialog-space for it. I see the Notion Ink use OLPC Pixel Qi tech in the new tablet.
Socially speaking, the project has been a great failure. But technologically, it has left a huge impact on portable devices everywhere. As for the former, the project probably forgot that "Charity begins at Home". Refusing to sell full-price to americans wanting them shows a complete lack of understanding of how economies of scale & price segmentation would've worked out. I'm not going to mourn the failure of Negroponte, but I'll just give the technical folks at OLPC a big thumbs-up.
I'll happily pay 200$ for an arm netbook'ish if they'll sell me one in India. Hell, I'll even fix all the things that don't work for me - for FREE. Not all of us are poor & in need of a hand-out. Heck, I'm at the verge of putting in a pre-order for a Notion Ink Adam, for double the price, if the hype pans out.