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Lessons To Learn From The OLPC Project
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 05, 2007 08:45 PM
from the keep-it-small-keep-it-cheap dept.
from the keep-it-small-keep-it-cheap dept.
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.'"
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Submission: Lessons to Learn from the OLPC by Anonymous Coward
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Hardware: Hacking the XO Laptop 95 comments
dulceLeche writes "While the OLPC was not designed with the American consumer in mind, people that took part in the Give One Get One program have been having fun with their XOs. The XO has a number of limitations, but with some work you can get Opera running, chat over your mesh network, and much more. An article at Geek.com explains what a few folks were able to do with their XOs."
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Crank it up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I have my own pull-string, or it can operate as a crank. Any women interested in charging it?
Re:Crank it up (Score:4, Funny)
Only women interested in charging you would be interested in charging it if you get my drift.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
How complicated will it be to get a suitable crank? I'm wondering if there will be a big market for accessories for this thing.
here ya go (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Crank it up (Score:4, Informative)
And the pullstring is better than a crank because you can put your foot through it and just keep tapping while you work.
Parent
Maybe they should have patented it all (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe they should have patented it all (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Maybe they should have patented it all (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
my favorite lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, the main problem is that to own one as a US citizen, you apparently need to pay more like $400 [olpcnews.com].
And for $400, you can get a nicer laptop online or even at your local walmart [walmart.com].
Wake me up again when I could actually buy them for a non-profit charter public charter school for $100, or even $150 each.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If the OLPC people allowed schools to buy the OLPC for it's current $200 cost in order to use it in a non-profit "for the kids" environment, they might act
Bull (Score:3, Interesting)
First, if you go about recommending peoeple build their game rigs around macs, I hope they have the sense to tell you you're talking shit. Video editing - maybe, and picassa looks exactly the same on windows and mac, which is what most people nowadays are happy to use rather than face Photoshop's steep learning-curve and/or price.
Second, I too am a sysadmin, and I too use my lappie for things that can be done by a 700MHz P3 like RDP and SSH.
HOWEVER, and this is where you're off the mark by a
Re:dude, shift your paradigms (Score:5, Interesting)
The mac mafia can blow me. There's things that macs do well, and there's things that they don't. PC's can edit video too. We say macs are preferable because it is nicer to do on a mac. And just like you can run photoshop or premiere on a PC, you can run some games on a mac. If you go through more than two games in a year, however, and don't want to be specifically choosing them off a somewhat narrow mac compatibility list, XP is the 99.9% compatible platforms for games, macs (maybe) coming in as a distant second. Recommending a mac for gaming is bad religion-driven advice, aimed to cynically use your "geek" status to bolster the ranks of your religion rather than do good to whoever is being advised.
Now, back to the topic:
1. I *import and resell* miniITX and nanoITX kit. You're preaching to the quire. I know damn well what a supposedly "underpowered" box can do, be you running gentoo, OpenBSD, or even woe and behold, Vista.
2. UMPC's are still immature, especially and specifically the sub-400$ 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]
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.
Parent
Re:dude, shift your paradigms (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:dude, shift your paradigms (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Parent
very few people DO any of that whizbang stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Simple hardware can do lots of stuff. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cxbstn2IZM [youtube.com]
Sure that one doesn't cover web usage, but without stupid Flash it would probably do decent in that area aswell.. Some more ram usage and so on is ok but the current rate and state are ridiculous.
I've used claris works on mac classics and LC IIs myself and I prefered it to works on win 3.11 on the 386s, and for most peoples use it would be sufficient today aswell..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I have a comment: Games are what Bootcamp is for.
For everything else on the list - video rendering, high-res photo-editing, music production - you want to boot right back into OS X.
computers in education, smalltalk (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:computers in education, smalltalk (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Are you going to try the twofer offer? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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File the OLPC as TNBT under old news.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Two things I liked (Score:2)
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 le
All of this could be ripped off... (Score:2, Informative)
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-
the lesson is: you probably don't need a laptop. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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...)
Serious question: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Serious question: (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Wrong, wrong and wrong.
SH isn't much of a performer, but ARM certainly is - especially anything from ARM11 and beyond. The AMD Geode chip in the OLPC is 433MHz and single issue. Pretty much all modern low power ARM chips are at least that clock speed.
So, compare what they do with that clock speed? If you were to compare general/integer computation between even an old ARM9 and the Geode, an ARM9 will beat it clock-for-clock. Modern desktop x86 chips are only fast because they do a ton of translation f
How stupid can people here be? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that Slashdot prides itself on not filtering user submissions. But as long as Slashdot refers to its... its... ermmmm... people who hit the approve button as editors, they should be held to editorial standards.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I want RIAA, ISP, RAM, OLPC, etc. to be spelled out for me I'd go read news sites geared toward the general public.
Re:first post (Score:4, Funny)
Right.
-b
Parent
Re:How do you get one of these? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:How do you get one of these? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Power & display (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Somehow, I suspect by the time OLPC manages to research its way into a $100 laptop for kids, the majors will be beating down the doors with the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 co
e-books (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
FalconParent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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