OLPC 2.0 — One Laptop Foundation Reboots 187
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."
Dead horse vapour (Score:5, Interesting)
Stop vaporising this dead horse.
Now based on a discontined CPU, and renamed because they never hit the price target; hijacked by Microsoft's department of evil, I really think they need to give up.
Shut it down (Score:1, Interesting)
power-advantage (Score:3, Interesting)
The OLPC screen really rocks. Only device I can comfortably surf on sun bathing on the deck.
Re:Same name; New Project (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 2007 holiday season ... the [G1G1] program took in $37 million. This past season, the foundation partnered with Amazon to sell the laptops and increased its advertising and marketing efforts substantially--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 "almost all" of the falloff to the poor economy, though others have theorized that the computers themselves had lost their appeal.
The fact that the second G1G1 failed despite significant marketing to the public-at-large, whereas the first G1G1 succeeded using only word-of-mouth and grass-roots marketing is quite telling. I'm sure there are many reasons (including the economy), but I believe the shift in values of the OLPC organization was a significant effect. I was super-keen to participate in the first G1G1 program: both because I felt I was helping an organization aligned with my ideals (free distribution of knowledge; free software, etc.) and because I felt that I was buying-in to a vibrant community (because all kinds of hackers and kids would be programming fun stuff for the platform).
But then I felt let-down by the changes in OLPC. The switch in emphasis (including the shift to Windows) meant that many enthusiasts and volunteers lost interest. And this devalued the whole platform to many people, since it seemed like the community was disappearing (or least fracturing and changing). So I stopped 'spreading the word', advocating for them, and didn't participate in the second G1G1. I'm sure many others felt as I did.
Obviously 1st-world enthusiasts and hackers are not the target audience for the XO. And yet I believe they were quite important in building and supporting the platform ($37 million from the first G1G1 is quite impressive), and that by neglecting that community OLPC has lost some of its most useful supporters. (Then again, I could be totally wrong; wouldn't be the first time someone over-estimated the influence they had on a particular sequence of events.)
Re:FUD in the article... (Score:5, Interesting)
but its not really lower power than netbooks.
Fully agree on that, the thing last 3 hours on normal use, thats nothing special, far from it. They still haven't even enabled the power saving stuff in the default configuration and the checkbox for that only made it their in the last release and of course it doesn't exactly work great, since the switching between sleep mode and normal one is very noticable. At least normal standby is now working, but even that took a long long while to implement.
Does the mesh networking actually work in the XO? And the mesh networking, how useful is it anyway?
In the type of setting for which the OLPC was designed for (i.e. school with plenty of OLPCs around), very useful I guess. In the western world on the other side: rather useless, since you have a hard time finding anybody with a OLPC to mesh network and instead just connect to the next best WLAN access point.
And the XO's G1G1 is hardly "poor economy", its that the XO early adopter-types got them the first go-round, so there was no one LEFT in the second.
I think the failure was a simple matter of price, you can today buy a better machine for less money. The $400 was never a competitive price to begin with (for refernce: thats the same one as Sonys PS3 has), but in the first round they didn't have competition, in the second they had plenty. By making the offer time limited and the price twice as high as needed they certainly ruined their chances and gave the competition plenty of room to get solid offerings on the ground.
All that said, ruggedness and sunlight readable screen are great and still something that no other laptop has. But slow development on the software side and complete failure to properly sell the thing to consumers just couldn't lead to a happy ending.
Re:too late (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right to point out that netbook owners can power their own netbook with a crank or whatever the OLPC ended up using, but the interesting part of the quote is "we really created the netbook market." Hilarious how they'll say that now, when they refused to sell the OLPC to anyone that actually wanted one in the US or Europe. Now that they can buy EEE's, there's (basically) no reason for someone in a developed country to even consider the OLPC.
If they had marketed the OLPC to everyone, they not only would have created the netbook market they would have owned it, while subsidizing their efforts in Africa. Instead, Asus jumped in where OLPC wouldn't... and here we are where we're at today. Asus is making a killing while OLPC has essentially folded.
Who invented netbooks? (Score:5, Interesting)
It can be argued that OLPC started the netbook category, when ASUS and Intel saw the outpouring of support.
This is the only article I could find [cnet.co.uk] cited by Wikipedia supporting the widely-repeated claim that OLPC inspired the "netbook" market, and this is just speculation by one UK blogger. Yet it's cited as a source for a factual statement in Wikipedia article about the XO-1 [wikipedia.org] filled with "citation needed" tags.
I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's kind of a broad and evangelistic claim and requires a little more research.
Thankfully, Gizmodo did an excellent series [gizmodo.com] on the trials and triumphs of OLPC, including the "who invented the netbook" question. There's no clear answer, but it definitely appears that the OLPC woke up computer manufacturers to the fact that there was a large, untapped market out there for cheap "netbooks."
Re:too late (Score:5, Interesting)
So who needs this OLPC stuff?
Off the top of my head:
The cheap eee PC laptops still don't serve those purposes. They probably never will, since it is a very specialized and likely unprofitable market.
Re:I'll take Pandora, thanks. (Score:3, Interesting)
That thing is not cheap at all. And while it's small, it's also quite bulky, due to the thickness of the device.
I can think of better ways of spending EUR 212/$330, if I want an ultraportable.
Re:Did you read TFA? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is this - only your first point of failure is a failure of their own goals. The remaining two are only failures by the lights of a community that projected their politics and biases onto the OLPC project.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:FUD in the article... (Score:5, Interesting)
the thing last 3 hours on normal use
That's just not true. In full backlight mode and WiFi you might get 3 hours on the OLPC, but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode, in ebook mode without WiFi, you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.
Fact is OLPC chose a lower capacity battery using a new type of technology which, doesn't pollute, doesn't explode (like netbook batteries potentially do), and most importantly the OLPC battery lifetime is much longer. A normal netbook Lithium-Ion battery lowers it's capacity already afte 500 recharge cycles, after about 1500 charge cycles, a normal netbook lithium-ion battery usually is totally dead. While the OLPC battery keeps its charge capacity for moe than 5000 recharge cycles. Which means the same OLPC can last more than 5 years with the same battery capacity while netbook batteries last only about 1-2 years.
Re:too late (Score:2, Interesting)
Horse not so dead (Score:5, Interesting)
OLPC has shipped (IIRC) 1 million machines, a number of pilot programs have gone well and will soon probably turn into larger purchases, the number of volunteers doing support, local training and infrastructure continues to increase geometrically.
OLPC doesn't have a bunch of market droids making sure that the PR is out there, but IMHO they have done, and are continuing to do, great things.
I don't think OLPC is over yet - quite the contrary.
And in answer to the 'poor folks don't need computers' - that is just stupid. The OLPC is one of the _answers_ to the problems of not enough books, schools, teachers, etc. For my own part, if I had had an XO when I was a kid, I could have taught myself at more than twice the rate that the schools worked at.
For real students, the net is the key to breaking out of the straitjacket of public education, which (like a team of horses) can only go as fast as the slowest person in the room. A networked laptop has the potential to provide a kind and level of freedom most people could not have dreamed of a few decades ago - the freedom to learn, to understand, to communicate and to compete.
Many developing nations are foregoing the expense of wired telecomms, using cellular instead - it's cheaper to do unless you already have wires in place. By adding a simple Wi-Fi hook at appropriate places, these countries could support the XO's networking at minimal extra cost.
Think of it this way - a developing nation with a computer-savvy young cohort, that is used to living on dirt, could become the biggest competitive nightmare that the developed world has seen yet. In ten years, we could have budding computer and bio-tech gurus coming out of Rwanda, like Steve Jobs and the other Silicon Valley geeks came out of the SF Bay Area in the 1970's.
Those kids will have the potential and the tools to break the cycle of cultural suppression that Africa has long suffered, to break the traditions of tribal conflict and to join together in creating new 'Black Tiger' national economic engines, like the 'Asian Tiger' nations of the 1980's.
And that will be something to see. I look forward to it.
Re:Horse not so dead (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll just reply to myself, to add a couple of video links. watch 10 year old kids in Uruguay discuss the advantages of asynchronous vs. synchronous communications, about email. Also mplayer, PDF, etc.
How many geeks on /. could discuss synchronous vs. asynchronous when they were 10?
Audio is bad, subtitles help.
http://www.overstream.net/view.php?oid=i2ueryser0rz [overstream.net]
http://www.overstream.net/view.php?oid=i4m7lvmniztl [overstream.net]
"There are amazing things in here...how the students and teacher keep in constant communication, how the teacher keeps track of what the students are doing, how and what they are learning from TurtleArt, how they use email, how they figured out how to convert and play YouTube videos, and how the teacher uses them as part of the curriculum." - from one of the OLPC mail lists.
Re:FUD in the article... (Score:2, Interesting)
You are probably using a big fat heavy 6-cell battery to get that type of battery life, thus a normal 3-cell battery on a netbook is 2.5 hours.
It's a fact the OLPC XO-1 consumes less than 10x less power than an Intel powered netbook.
The question shouldn't be only about the battery life of the battery, it should be about if the kids can recharge the laptop using a hand crank, using a bicycle or other human power generator system.
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:4, Interesting)
The laptops are a one-time expense. New ebooks literally cost an SD card and postage.
Meanwhile, the kids with paper Pre-Algebra and Biology textbooks have read them cover-to-cover forwards and backwards because they don't have the the Algebra 1 or Chemistry books.
Re:too late (Score:2, Interesting)