Kids Review the OLPC

A. N. Onymous sends us to OLPCNews for an account of kids' reactions to the OLPC XO, and comments: "My first impression is, it's just like when you give a kid a box of Lego." The video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister replacing a mobo is pretty cool.

Chinese kids are even cheaper.

[nick_davison]

The video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister replacing a mobo is pretty cool.

Correction: The muted video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister being blatantly directed on exactly what to do by the pair of adult hands that keep entering the video to catch things they do wrong (including almost dropping it at one point) and apparently updating the instructions for them that they're evidently not doing on their own implies OLPC has learned what Nike figured out twenty years ago: kids make the best slave labor.

Re:Amazing concept

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you ignorant or just stupid?
How about to pump water, the basic necessity of life? Or running a generator for electricity? Without electricity your day is basically over as soon as the sun sets. How about for a small tractor to aid in farming the land? Etc, etc, etc...........

Re:Amazing concept

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't look at taking a motherboard apart as a skill that can be utilized in the future, but rather something that gives a child inspiration to do what they love, and learn exciting new things without any type of fear or hesitation.

Re:spare mobo's

[gradedcheese]

That 'plague' has to do with electrolytic capacitors. Please take a look at this image:

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/1/10/Proto-a-front.j pg [laptop.org]

Note the near-absence of electrolytic caps, especially the junky through-hole ones you find on your typical motherboard.

Re:Amazing concept

[mrvan]

Hey, and at least they can now look up on the internet how to repair a two stroke engine!

Re:Amazing concept

[Fred_A]

Hey "little monkey" (I'm assuming that's the translation of your UID), why would (s)he have to be American. Couldn't (s)he be an equally ignorant person from another developed and rich country?

Very unlikely. Other developed and rich countries are typically exposed to foreign cultures daily through news and media and people there actually travel abroad. Only people in the US actually believe that foreigners all live in mud huts.
Only in the US have I ever seen a major local (as opposed to national) newspaper with about 1/2 page (out of 40) of world news. The exposure of the random US person to international matters is almost nil (or deformed beyond recognition).
Luckily there are enough exceptions to balance things a little.

Re:OLPC

[Anonymous Coward]

There's not as much corporate sponsorship going on as you think, but your misconceptions are understandable, given that many articles about the OLPC have been taken out of context when posted on Slashdot.

The memory slot (not actual memory) was added not so that the laptop could run Windows, but because the slot would be useful and changes to the design allowed it to be added for minimal cost. The laptop remains unable to run anything like WinXP or Vista, as it still lacks the processing power and basic storage space. See Walter Bender's comments:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:The_OLPC_Wiki#Open_ source.3F [laptop.org]

The laptops will still run a modified version of Fedora -- not Windows -- when they are distributed. Microsoft's efforts to run Windows on the laptops are entirely their own initiative. OLPC provided a number of laptops to different companies like Microsoft and Google (in addition to many educational institutions) to encourage development and experimentation, and this is one of the things Microsoft chose to do with their laptop. Everything distributed with the laptops is still entirely open source (with the possible exception of the wireless driver, but that's another story).

As far as processors go, the AMD Geode was chosen for the laptop because it is cheap and has low power consumption. The choice of chip for the initial distribution of laptops has not changed -- it is still the AMD Geode. The recent involvement with Intel applies to the school servers (essentially desktop machines, distributed to each school), not the laptops themselves. Future versions of the laptop and server may have different chips, but the currently planned versions have AMD chips for the laptop and Intel for the server.