OLPC 2.0 — One Laptop Foundation Reboots

Greg Huang writes "In early January, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation laid off half its staff and shed work on the Sugar graphical interface. Now, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and president Chuck Kane for the first time detail the foundation's new plans, describe how the XO laptop will do what netbooks can't do, and share their hope to keep working with Sugar developer Walter Bender, who left OLPC last year."

I'll take Pandora, thanks.

[Janek Kozicki]

I have preordered the Pandora console [openpandora.org] and I'm happy. It gives me about 10h of running Ubuntu on an ARM cpu in a mere 0.3 kg of weight.

Oh thre's also an unofficial blog [wordpress.com] and a video vault [kultpower.de]. You might like the forums [gp32x.com] too.

Re:Dead horse vapour

[Anonymous Coward]

They also sabotaged their own efforts by NOT offering these units to the general public. Their limited "Buy One Give One" program was too little, too late.

If they had allowed the sale of the units to the general public, or even domestic markets (which I think they eventually did let one school district in the USA buy them) they would not have had such difficulty securing the minimum orders to secure their price point. They would also have had a revenue stream to sustain themselves and subsidize units for distribution in poorer areas. And they could STILL have remained a non-profit business while doing so.

Instead, Negroponte decided that it wasn't enough to give learning computers to underprivileged children in third-world coutnries - he also had to ensure that anyone who could actually afford them would be denied.

But the window of opportunity is now closed: The Asus Eee PC and similar products are satisfying the market the XO only teased. Sure the XO has a few features that other netbooks don't, but the novelty that could have taken them "over the hump" has worn off and now they're screwed.
=Smidge=

Re:too late

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have an OLPC XO-1 and have logged a fairy decent amount of time on eee PCs(contract job, an outfit was looking to make citrix thin clients out of them).

My comparision: eeePC is notably more powerful, no question. It also feels more like a "real" computer, probably because of the hard top, rather than rubber, keyboard(also the color, obviously). The screen, though, is something else entirely. With the backlight off, or in bright sunlight, you get a 1200x900, very sharp, very readable, 200dpi, reflective LCD screen. With backlight on, or in lower light, you get color at somewhat lower, though still adequate, effective resolution. The screen is the big deal. In color mode, it is as good or better than a standard netbook screen. In greyscale, it is by far the best electronic reading device I've ever used(e-ink might be better; I've not seen it). The mesh stuff is cute; but not something I've had a chance to play with much. Sugar is interesting; but other linuxes work as well.

I can certainly see why netbooks would be largely preferable in many situations; but they cannot touch the OLPC screen, for my purposes, nor do they have any of the cute collaborative stuff(whose utility I cannot comment on).

Re:I'll take Pandora, thanks.

[Janek Kozicki]

They will ship somewhere around April or March. That's the whole point of pre-ordering. See the videos, like for example the last one, of a prototype [openpandora.org] (there are other movies as well, with working ubuntu, openoffice, gimp, etc.. - see the links in OP), which is now heading into mass production.

The OpenPandora guys were wise enough to not take any loans from banks, and so they are safe now despite the worldwide financial crisis. Instead they let people to make preorders about three months ago. People who don't trust, were not required to preorder ;) Their servers almost overloaded when preordering started, anyway. They sold about 1000 units in first 10h (or so [gp32x.com] - this post was written 17 hours after preordering started). And the first batch is just 4000 units. If you keep your eye on it, maybe you will be lucky to get one from the second batch, there are lots of people who want it.

Negroponte should have listened to us

[Anonymous Coward]

In the 2007 holiday season, Negroponte told me, the program took in $37 million. This past season, the foundation partnered with Amazon to sell the laptops and increased its advertising and marketing efforts substantiallyâ"to two or three times what they were in 2007, or close to $20 million, virtually all of it pro bono. Yet, sales fell off a cliff, coming in at about $2.5 million. Negroponte attributes âoealmost allâ of the falloff to the poor economy [...]

Or maybe it was because Nicholas Negroponte sold out to Microsoft and pissed off all the people who were buying from/evangalising the project. I'm amazed to see how much of an effect geeks/nerds can have. Don't think you're powerless fellow nerds, you can make a difference, even if it's from the confines of your mum's basement!

Just look at these threads on their mailing list [laptop.org] from last year, Nicholas is signed-up to it, multiple people are telling him in specific terms why trying to use Windows is a bad idea, and what does he do? Ignore them.

Negroponte is getting what he deserves for ignoring the community and selling-out to Microsoft. What an arsehole.

Re:Same name; New Project

[marnues]

This is not clothing. Clothing is very old technology that is saturated the world over. Yes dumping clothes does destroy any chance of a market economy based on selling clothing. You certainly take it for granted that other perfectly viable and probably better alternative economic models exist. Corrupt governments are only part of the problem. Subsistence living is the real natural enemy of capitalism as no company is able to exist without massive government support. Half of the problem is corrupted officials. The other half is our (as in the Western world) expectations that you can plug-and-play capitalism. Capitalism takes generations to gain a foothold and only where you can change common practices. When and where we drop clothes into Africa, we are not competing with any market economy. We are instead trying to stop them from being subsistent by giving them free time that they would be spending on making their own clothes. Yes this has unintended consequences that makes it a very poor decision to donate mass amounts of clothing to these areas. But you are creating a theoretical economy that does not exist and could not exist in that culture. And then you try to apply it to personal computers? No not even personal computers. Very small form-factor computers. Have you used an XO? No one in any sort of industrial nation should want one. There is no market except the free one. If these people have the ability to purchase even an Asus EEEPC, they will choose that over the XO.

Re:FUD in the article...

[rqzmeeu]

My -- that is my *daughter's* -- XO is very low power. Whether it's the power savings across the whole chipset, the ability to enter certain sleep states while keeping the display on, no hard drive, whatever: it's got a tiny power supply, charges quickly (bonus: with a wide range of input voltages!), and never gets hot. Seems really freakin' low power to me.

Of course, others have pointed out that it's rugged. (If you haven't handled one, it's easy to fail to appreciate this fully.)

The keyboard is fine. Not great, but fine. And certainly tough. If you're a kid, it's great. No, you're not going to break any world records for typing speeds, but that's not what it's for.

But all this ignores the software. I'm not a fan of Sugar, but I do see just how much it buys you from an educational perspective. If you wanted to get a kid to start learning to program, this computer is *ideal*. The programming activities are just begging for you to tinker, and the fact that it's all Python means that as you learn, you can start modifying the interface.

The basic activities draw in even very young children very quickly. My daughter at 2 liked hitting keys on the keyboard of the mac and the linux Thinkpad. She *loved* playing with the music activities, or even the simple text-to-speech program, on the XO. Sure, you could replicate the functionality on a netbook with linux. Unless you installed Sugar, however, you would have a *lot* of work to do to make it as inviting.

Again, I say this despite the fact that I don't like Sugar. IceWM and no journal trying to index 8 gig flash drives suits me fine. But to get kids seriously involved in computing, the software is as impressively put together as the hardware.

It's easy to say they should have sold them at $250 each. They thought they were going to get millions of orders from developing countries, and they didn't want to get distracted trying to serve the developed world. They didn't realize that Microsoft/Intel would undermine their efforts in the ways that they did. They were idealistic and focused and didn't foresee certain things. I'll cut them some slack, since their focus did result in something so beautifully engineered.

Bummer if they don't ship many millions of XOs, great that they showed what is possible in the neighborhood of $200-$300.

Even with the dropping prices of netbooks, I'd still say that an XO is worth $400. If your child would otherwise get a PS3, no question.

OLPC is 10x to 20x lower power than netbooks

[Charbax]

OLPC runs at below 2W all included, even below 1W in ebook reading mode, Netbooks need at least 20W all included.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[gbarules2999]

Because 20 or 30 textbooks are expensive ($80 a pop!) and get outdated in five years.

Re:Dead horse vapour

[davolfman]

The intent was to prevent the OLPC's from being stolen. In order to do that they had to make it so that there was no such thing as a legitimate second-hand unit. If they allowed a market in the first world it was reasoned that all the student machines would get swiped and sold. As it is, with no actual proper supply chain built, there's little proof that's not what happened anyway.

Re:FUD in the article...

[XMode]

Really?? 2 hours on a netbook? I get almost 5 out of mine, with the screen and wifi on full time.. It doesn't actually increase much when the wifi is turned off, but if you use it sporadically and have the screen set to turn off after 5 mins and hibernate after 10 it can go for 2 or 3 days without charging..