OLPC Gets a New Name, New Features 226
pickyouupatnine writes "According to a story on Ars Technica, the $100 MIT Laptop is now going to cost $140. It has a new name — it'll now be called the Children's Machine 1 (CM1). The added price comes with new features! The laptop will now come with a 400 MHz AMD processor, 512 Megs of Flash storage, an SD card slot, mic and headphone jacks, a built in camera, built-in wireless, and an 8-inch LCD at a 1280x900 resolution." From the article: "Tremendous progress has been made this summer on the Sugar user interface system that will be shipped with the CM1. Funded by Google through the Summer of Code (SoC) initiative, intrepid college student Erik Pukinskis has collaborated with the GNOME development community to adapt AbiWord for use with the portable Linux system. Although still experimental, AbiWord has successfully been integrated into the Sugar environment. Artists and developers continue to work on the evolving Sugar interface, and the fruits of their labor can be seen in demoes, mockups, and design reviews."
Software security issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's assume there is one nice security hole in these laptops... Is there an automatic update system? Is it centrally controlled like Windows Update or since there are supposed to be large numbers of segregated ad-hoc networks is the distribution of these updates going to be peer based?
How do you prevent making one large botnet powered by a bunch of third-world children turning hand cranks?
Feature Creep... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Feature Creep... (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop this elitist culture of whining (Score:5, Insightful)
Get up out of your server log, or your WOW game and take a look at real life in remote places. If you don't like what you see in the "$100 laptop" program, stop whining and start doing something about it. They have a website. Go contact them to help.
The CM1 is neat. Me want. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Software security issues (Score:2, Insightful)
A. Is brand new and relatively untested,
B. Has a captive audience that has NO PRIOR COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE
and
C. Has millions of identical (hardware as well as software) copies wirelessly connected around the globe.
This is the perfect target. Imagine trying to explain to 3rd world kids why they should install patches on their magic picture box.
Re:Didn't Deliver (Score:4, Insightful)
I've got a Mac, I've had it for about 18 months now and I love it. I especially love the command prompt and all the Unix utilities. That said, I agree with the decision they made. Being able to tinker and repair the laptop, as well as write kernel changes and such, is a major boon. Children will be able to learn much more about the computer if they are interested. As much as I love my Mac, it doesn't compared to Linux in a few areas. There is much more information available through some of the interfaces on Linux (/dev and such, for example) than I can find on my Mac. There is quite a bit of documentation on writing drivers and kernel changes for Linux, but next to none for OS X save Apple's documentation (which I find to be a little sparse).
Don't forget that while OS X runs well on older Macs, a custom slimmed-down Linux will run much faster and use far fewer resources. OS X is just not designed to run on 128MB of RAM by any stretch, let alone less so applications still have room to run. Frankly I think Jobs knew that OS X was incompatible with what the OLPC people were planning (mostly hardware wise, but also in ideals).
I'm not surprised that RedHat is the distro chosen (especially considering that they are a sponsor), but I don't think that's why they didn't go with OS X.
Re:Software security issues (Score:3, Insightful)
If you'd read any of the stories about the OLPC you'd know the crank was dropped from the design months ago. People keep using that image to stigmatise it. Your "third world" qualification only adds to that odour.
But to your actual point: I hardly think the laptops will be a threat to you in your first world home. Internet connectivity between the third and first worlds is poor and likely to remain so. Even if your imagined botnet materialised their attacks would trickle out and be easily blocked. And why would anyone bother when there are tens of millions of wide-open Windows PCs on fat pipes in rich countries?
Wrong approach to education... (Score:3, Insightful)
The solution to education is that we elevate it to status that it deserves. Talk to many successfull people, and I'd wager that they could point to less than five (5) teachers that made a difference in their life and learning. Our Education system has these major ERRORS in it's design.
1.) Grade school is focused on churning out people who meet an arbitrary number on college entrance exams
2.) College is focused on churning out as many BS students as possible.
3.) It's too easy to get a teaching certificate
3.) ALL CLASSROOM TEACHERS ARE PAID TOO LITTLE
Solve problems 1, 2, and alter those to focus on critical thinking and you'll see a major difference in our children. Solve problem 3, 4, and we will never have to speak about teacher shortages again.
Re:Feature Creep... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A camera on a children's computer is a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
sounds like someone did a bad job at parenting, like the parents of the kid in the article.
Re:Wrong approach to education... (Score:1, Insightful)
3.) ALL CLASSROOM TEACHERS ARE PAID TOO LITTLE
Clearly, a better education system is needed, especially in basic mathematics.
Re:Software security issues (Score:3, Insightful)
Why was the parent modded flamebait? They actually have a really good point. Qualities that have long been fairly Windows centric will now be coming to Linux i.e. extremely similar installations and barely computer-literate users. Linux has always tended to embody the opposite of those two situations. I wouldn't be surprised if viruses targeted for these machines started to appear once they start circulating in non-trivial numbers.
Re:No, try again (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like he had it right: OUR education sustems and OUR younger generations. But as I understand it, the CM1 is targeting children in developing countries. While that's grand, I'm nevertheless a firm believer that when it comes to a child's development having access to food and water and not dying of diarrhea is more important than having access to a computer.
I just wish all the big brains at MIT and elsewhere who've put such an enormous amount of time and effort into this project had instead put it into a device or infrastructure system that could provide for the clean water and power needs of the same communities their $140 laptop is targeting. In my opinion, that would do a lot more good.
I'm getting tired (Score:5, Insightful)
will have crank to power it up!
ok now it won't have crank
will look like a normal laptop!
ok now it'll look like a laptop-cross-lolipop.
it'll be $100!
ok now it won't be.
I expect this to progress in future until it ends up as a perfect clone feature/price-wise of a Dell laptop.
They should've discussed and tested all this stuff in private before thew blew the horns, again and again and again and again.
Learning by installments (Score:3, Insightful)
Why flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)