Scott's Blog

I bought two OLPC (aka XO) laptops and gave one to a needy child through the G1G1 (Give One/Get One) promotion. In fact I gave two laptops since Google matched my donation (thanks Google!). It's already arrived at my Mother's house, it'll be interesting to see how it's changed since the beta machine (which I still have, but I can't upgrade anymore without bricking it). Maybe the dollar will go down in 2009 and the price of materials as well so that they can start selling the laptop at something near $100.00.

I asked for and got an OLPC to test and work on. My first impressions are very favorable. It's very small and cute and something that kids are immediately drawn to, because it's not adult sized. My 6 year old son has been playing with it on and off and I just saw him today explaining how to play on the laptop. I even overheard him saying that the laptop connects to other laptops which he must have overheard me mentioning to someone else. The keyboard is very small, but it's perfectly acceptable for two finger typing. My only complaint is that the space bar and enter keys have dead areas in it, but that ought to be fixed pretty soon. The biggest complaint from my son is the trackpad. He was almost brought to tears trying to use it. It was frustrating for him because he would try to move right and it would move left. Even build 303 seems to have that problem on occasion. I never had problems with it, but I'm more used to using a trackpad. It looks like he was st...

I've asked for and looks like will receive an BTest-1 OLPC laptop for development and testing. My son is working through letters and numbers so I'm looking on adapting a program for that. It should be very interesting seeing how he uses the laptop as my tester. Perhaps I can convince some of my colleagues at Google Brazil to contribute some time as well, it's a very exciting project.

The One Laptop Per Child ( OLPC ) project has an interesting take on building security for the laptop. Here is my list of why the OLPC is especially vulnerable to security issues. 100's of millions of these near identical laptops will be produced, making it a target for crackers. The OLPC group want the child to be able to hack their own laptops, get right down to the code. Some of the children are going to be very young, entering a password or even replying to dialog prompts may be asking too much. These devices automatically connect to each other and automatically connect to the Internet. So what will they be doing to improve security? They have a system called Bitfrost , which comes from Norse mythology, where Bitfröst is the bridge which keeps mortals who live in Midgard from venturing into Asgrad, the realm of the gods. Nearly all programs running on the laptop will be running in a fortified chroot, sort of like BSD jail. Programs will store their data on a new object oriente...

Professor José Antonio Meira da Rocha has done some number crunching and found that the OLPC XO laptop will cost about R$0.59 per child per hour (about 27 cents US). This includes the cost of the laptop, electricity, training, OLPC servers, and internet connection. In comparison having Computer labs where 5 or more students share one computer would cost R$9.90 per hour. His numbers show that the total cost of ownership (TCO) OLPC will be R$94.07 per year (vs. a computer lab's TCO of $R586.00). The problem with computer labs is that the child doesn't feel any ownership of the shared computer, he or she can't just pick it up any time and start using it. Also kids don't like sitting in chairs for hours at a time. On top of that the OLPC has a better display than a typical computer and so is better for reading. Having just spent R$300.00 on books, pencils and paper for my son for school this year, $94.07 looks like a steal.

It's always fun to make some predictions so you can make a fool of yourself in 12 months time. So here it goes: The Nintendo Wii will outsell the XBox 360, although it may take all year. Most XBox 360 owners will also have a Wii. The US economy will do worse in 2007 than in 2006. A part of the reason will be because of lowered housing prices. Brazil will do marginally better in 2007 than 2006. The OLPC will have a rough start mostly because of political reasons and an extended smear campaign but will be an utter success as 2008 rolls around. We'll start seeing more machines with Linux pre-installed on it instead of Windows in 2007 or with a sticker saying "linux ready" or some such. We'll slowly start seeing companies putting Linux on their employees desktops instead of windows because it is easier to administer and catches less viruses. People will start understanding that DRM is evil and will actively try to avoid it, despite the lack of legal choices. Some s...

Mark J. Foster gave a longish presentation about the OLPC ($100.00 laptop) project which you can watch here . It's one of the best explanations I've seen yet about the project and goes into some details of the hardware. I've mentioned before that this project can make sense solely as an e-book reader and Foster says that (vindicating my guess). He mentions that most countries spend more than $100.00 over five years in books for children, if they buy the laptop and download the books they would not only save money, but have something that does more than what paper books can do. Other things that were new to me is that the laptop will have a light to see the keyboard. I already knew about the web cam but he gave a nice scenario about the first time you turn on the device. When you first turn it on, through diagrams and audio it help you take a picture of your face and creates an avatar. As others turn on their laptops and go through the process you should start seeing t...

I came across this article from business week (2000!) it asks the question: "What would happen if you put a computer in a public place with a high speed internet connection?" The answers are surprising. Kids (mostly 6-12) in slums who can't read English were able to draw pictures, play music and browse the net. The computer had no keyboard and was protected behind a wall, and yet it was a success. Kids used it and when they suggested taking it away the parents said "no!". A failure, in my estimation, would have been if the computer was left running and nobody used it. I think this bodes well for the OLPC project. The big difference is that the $100 laptop would be one kid's computer, a computer they can keep and take home. They can explore the world and their mind at their own leisure. They can download tens of thousands of books (from the Gutenberg Project , for instance) and you don't have to worry about the libraries budgetary constraints, or i...

The One Laptop Per Child project has been going ahead steadily. There are sample boards and people are working on getting all the applications to behave properly so that it can go to sleep when idle. Lots of programs, including Python+ GLib , wake up every 100 milliseconds making it difficult for the laptop to go to sleep and thus use less power. Fixes are in so that the programs that are installed on the laptop behave properly. The project is also creating it's own BIOS which doesn't use ACPI to suspend/resume, they want something even faster. There a tickless patch to the kernel by RedHat which should bring the laptop to less than 3 watts of power when idle. In other news , India says they are going to make a $10.00 laptop, in three years! Yeah, right. By that time the OLPC laptop should cost around $50.00 anyway. My take is that India is still sore about their flopped attempt of a cheap laptop - the simputer , and their previous experience with the MIT media lab. ...