The chairman and founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative said in an interview Tuesday that the XO laptop may switch from using Linux to eventually running Windows XP, according to several reports.
Windows XP could soon be available on the XO.
(Credit: OLPC)In an interview with the Associated Press following the departure of the OLPC project's president, Nicholas Negroponte said the open-source Sugar software, developed expressly for the XO, could run on top of XP. Negroponte cited weaknesses in the XO's current open-source operating system (right now the XO can't support the latest versions of Flash animation) as well as the Linux community itself (for being too "fundamentalist") as the reasons for a possible future shift.
He said the laptop's open-source software had actually scared away potential adopters.
An XP-only version of the XO could come soon enough. In December Microsoft said it would begin running limited tests in January to see if the operating system would be a good fit for the low-cost device. At the time, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of the year.
More low-cost laptops are headed to a retailer near you.
Intel plans on expanding the distribution of its inexpensive, school children-friendly Classmate PC to U.S. and European retail outlets, according to a Reuters report on Wednesday.
Intel's Classmate PC
(Credit: Intel)The Classmate will sell for $250 to $350, Lila Ibrahim, general manager of Intel's emerging market platform group, told Reuters. Apparently Intel has already been conducting pilot programs using the devices in classrooms in the U.S. and Australia.
Though the Classmate is already available on the retail markets of India, Mexico, and Indonesia, this will be the first time the device has been for sale to consumers in the developed world.
Intel designed the PC for use in schools in developing nations. Local manufacturers build them with customized software configurations for the needs of specific local markets.
The XO from the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which also builds low-cost notebooks for the same markets, has been available via retail in the U.S. for a while. OLPC had a promotion where consumers here paid $400, which bought one XO for them and one for a school kid in the developing world.
But they're not the only ones jumping into this fray. Asus launched its low-cost, stripped-down Linux-based Eee PC last fall specifically for the U.S., Japanese, and European retail markets, and caused quite the stir. It sold 350,000 units in the first quarter it was available here, and is making some of the biggest names in computing a wee bit nervous. It's giving pause to worldwide PC leader Hewlett-Packard, and second-largest notebook manufacturer Acer, both of whom are said to be readying their own low-cost, small form-factor laptops for sometime this year.
The Eee PC certainly is bringing cachet to the tiny, Linux-based laptop segment, but will that translate to the cheaper Classmate PC? The Classmate is a bit clunkier looking, and has a silly-looking (though great for kids) handle on the spine, whereas the Eee comes in a variety of colors and looks like a laptop an adult wouldn't mind being seen with at his or her local coffeehouse.
Ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are just some of the forces of nature that can wreak havoc on the lives of untold thousands in a period of seconds, minutes, days, or months. As global temperatures rise and as a growing human population expands into more and more areas less and less suited for either habitation or rescue, the average person in the world (one of 6+ billion) faces an increasing likelyhood that he or she will face a real disaster that seriously disrupts possible response.
Consider the plight of Sri Lanka, which was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. According to a BBC eyewitness reporter:
There are no kind of emergency services here, there are no helicopters thumping through the sky to come to save people. It is a do-it-yourself rescue.
The final tally reported more than 40,000 dead and a staggering 2.5 million displaced. And from the report's summary: "Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars, and even a train with 1,700 passengers." Whatever infrastructure may have existed prior to the tsunami, it was completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of human need and the destructive power of the disaster. Within hours, open-source software developers created the Sahana project, and within days, their home-grown solution was doing more to help the Sri Lankan people than first-world conventional software packages did in far less extreme circumstances. And now it is doing even more, with the One Laptop Per Child hardware platform.
... Read moreOur family took a roadtrip from North Carolina to South Carolina in the past month. We all agreed that my daughter could not ask "Are we there yet?" more than five times, and we decided to bring along one of our XO laptops to give her a fighting chance. (We've never had an in-car video system.) After her first "Are we there yet?" question, we suggested she might want to boot up the XO, and she did.
... Read moreTwo weeks I wrote about how the XO laptop endowed a 9-year-old boy with seemingly magical powers (of intellectual curiosity and competence), and I wondered aloud whether my 8-year-old daughter would fare as well. On the one hand, she does like gadget gifts such as The Littlest Petshop. On the other hand, many such gadgets wind up as nothing more than a surface waiting to be decorated with stickers or glitter glue. Would her reaction to the XO validate or repudiate Negroponte's hypothesis that his project is an education project, not a laptop project? It seemed to work pretty well for Rufus.
We decided to open the laptops on Christmas Eve--the two I bought via the Give One Get One program, plus a third I bought from a co-worker who had Given One but did not want to Get One. Go figure. My first happy surprise was that the XO logo was different on all three. This made it possible to identify which was whose without stickers.
After booting them up, we all had to learn the Sugar interface. My second surprise was that it was not quite obvious to me how these XOs would network. Two of them were quite happy to mesh with one another. The third (which I'd opened earlier) was all happy about our Netgear wireless router and could not be bothered with the mesh network. How the heck was I going to get the two that were networked together to network to me?
I confess: I had to go to the Web to read some documentation about the theory and practice of the Sugar interface and network connectivity. This gave me my third (and happy) surprise: it was quite obvious once you grokked it, and it also meant that these laptops are not quite as promiscuous with their connectivity as first I had feared. I knew that the Sugar interface was based around activities, but I didn't understand until reading the documentation that the activity was the thing you shared, not a network connection or hardware resource. When my daughter started a chat, she could go to her neighborhood, and when mousing over her own chat application, she could decide to invite others she had marked as friends. With this two-level acceptance policy (first, she has to find and mark a friend; second, the only activities that are shared are the ones you choose to share with a friend), the XO is far less of a security risk than first I feared. Nevertheless, I wanted to really make sure I understood the features and the limits of XO networking so I hopped on #olpc-help and verified that my network bifurcation was a known limitation (possibly to be fixed with update.1 in mid-January).
But the real fun began after we started to explore the XO's games. I told her to open Pippy and we played the "guess the number" game. In Pippy, the source code appears on the top half of the screen, and the interaction window (where you enter your name and guess the number) appears on the bottom half. She played the game three times, averaging about 7 guesses per try, and then said "I want to play another game." I suggested she try playing a different game by modifying the parameters to guess a number between 1 and 1,000,000, instead of between 1 and 100. She looked at me with wide eyes. I explained that on the top was a program, the program of the game, and that if she changed a single number in two places, she could change the game itself. She went from a look of "no way" to a look of "OK! What are we waiting for!" in about 200 milliseconds. She started to enter a million, decided that was just a little too large, and changed it to 1,000. She hit "run" and sure enough, the prompt asked for a guess between 1 and 1,000. She looked at me excitedly. I told her to guess, and after 11 guesses, she got it. She looked at me again, somewhat amazed. I told her she had just programmed the computer. I might as well have told her we were going to spend a week in Cinderella's castle--she jumped up, shrieked, and yelled "HEY MOMMY! GUESS WHAT!? I JUST PROGRAMMED THE COMPUTER!"
Needless to say there was much excitement. She tried other modifications, including a version of the game she could win every time on the first try. She got her syntax errors, run-time errors, all the other scrapes and bruises one gets on the way to learning how to program, but she was excited, elated, and became confident! The little scorekeeper in me said:
Negraponte: 1, Doubt: 0.
I had to report this success to the #olpc-help newsgroup, which brought forth some cheers and hoopla. A person logged in as cjb asked "Are you the Michael Tiemann?" I explained that while there are a few, yes, I was the guy who wrote GNU C++. He responded that he was the author of Pippy—how cool is that? The author of the very program was reading the mailing list on Christmas Day!
So far, everything, and I mean everything about the XO has exceeded my expectations: the build quality, the software functionality, and most importantly, the positive effect it has had on my daughter's curiosity and confidence about computers. What a great gift!
On Thursday BBC News gave us a child's view of the $100 laptop. The article reads like a techie version of Jim Carrey's breakout movie The Mask, with Rufus Cellan-Jones as the star. The laptop, which came by way of Nigeria, unleashes incredible intuition and abilities in young Cellan-Jones:
... Read more
My First Computer, for ages 3 to 6
(Credit: LeapFrog)
The New York Times' Technology section leads with the story headlined "For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device," declaring:
Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.
On the plus side, retailers and toymakers have learned that children are not satisfied with fake gadgets. Hooray for authenticity!
On the minus side...
... Read moreSteven Levy's Newsweek cover story The Future of Reading was so unabashedly reverential toward the new Kindle reader that I had to check twice to make sure the article wasn't a paid product placement. Though the official product review only took up three-quarters of a page, there's no mistaking the impression that the seven-page spread is about Amazon's Kindle and its potential as the electronic device that will "leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That's shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers writer, and publishers publish." Other devices such as the Sony Reader and One Laptop Per Child XO laptop receive very brief mentions.
... Read more
(Credit:
OLPC)
Just a friendly reminder: the two-week Give One Get One OLPC promotion got under way today, which means you have until November 26 (should you be a resident of the U.S. or Canada) to plunk down $399 to purchase an XO laptop for yourself while donating another to a child in a developing nation. If you want yours by the holidays, it's probably best to act sooner than later; OLPC doesn't guarantee delivery in time for the holidays but states your odds are greater the earlier you order. Two other notes: you can write off $200 of the order, and T-Mobile is throwing in a year of free HotSpot access for U.S. participants.
Workers at Quanta Computer's manufacturing plant in Changshu, China, begin mass production of the XO laptop.
(Credit: One Laptop per Child)Following a number of delays, the One Laptop per Child Foundation's much-awaited XO laptop for needy kids has finally gone into mass production. Early Tuesday (local time), Taiwan's Quanta Computer started producing the green-and-white computer in its new Changshu manufacturing center, two hours northwest of Shanghai.
The commencement of mass production means children in developing nations could have the rugged, open-source laptops in hand starting this month. The OLPC has already announced orders for kids in Uruguay and Mongolia. (Residents of the U.S. and Canada participating in the Give 1 Get 1 program--which donates an XO to a child in a developing nation for every machine sold online--are expected to start getting laptops in December.)
"Today represents an important milestone in the evolution of the One Laptop per Child project," MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the nonprofit One Laptop per Child, said in a statement Tuesday. "Against all the naysayers, and thanks to great partners such as Quanta, we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children."
Quanta has recently increased its manufacturing capacity, and says XO production will ramp up over time.
The XO laptop, while generally heralded by many for its good intentions and potential impact, has hit its share of snags on the road to adoption. In addition to production delays, which give competing low-cost machines time to gain traction, the price point, originally set for $100, has crept up closer to $200.
