First of the OLPCs Built

eldavojohn writes "An announcement came Sunday that the first ten prototypes of the Linux-powered OLPC XO-1 had been completed in China. From the article, 'Quanta, the Chinese computer maker that won the international bidding for the project earlier this year, will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners.' Let's hope that these first prototypes do not warrant any design changes and that the testing goes well so that countries that expressed interest (Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Argentina, and Thailand) can start distributing them soon."

It's worth noting...

[Otter]

Not that this project had any lack of vapor already, but it's worth noting that the Thai government that vaguely signed on to this project over the summer was overthrown in a military coup a few weeks later. We'll see how high a priority this is for the new guy.

Those of you who were hailing Khaddafi's deep commitment to freedom when he jumped aboard will be relieved to know that he's not going anywhere anytime soon, though...

Re:Childrens laptop?

[leuk_he]

libya has oil [wikipedia.org] and is not a real poor country.

"These oil revenues and a small population give Libya one of the highest GDPs per person in Africa"

Re:But can it feed them?

[Timesprout]

The battery can be charged with a hand crank.

Re:Childrens laptop?

[tomstdenis]

Believe it or not the OLPC people are not COMPLETE FUCKING MORONS

There are lockdown measures to avoid corrupt distribution. A black market wouldn't really work because a stolen OLPC laptop won't work. Not to mention that they're pretty much useless for most other tasks. A geek may want one for the neat factor or for an effective terminal. But you can't exactly play 3d shooters on them, or store gigabytes of movies or whatever (I doubt you could even play a divx on it).

The corrupt market would be to steal the boards and then try to sell them to schools. Which is exactly what they're aiming to stop.

As for the GP, yes, it's COUNTRIES that buy them, not students.

Tom

Re:black market

[__aajqwr7439]

Found this in the OLPCWiki:

Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?
The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.
The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_market [laptop.org]

Nice to know I'd be thinking of the children rather that stealing their laptops...

DN

Re:Seems like putting the cart before the horse to

[B1LL_GAT3Z]

Just to clarify (I'm a developer working for the OLPC) that we've had developer boards for months-and-months now, using them to test the software on. These particular computers are simply more complete. But yeah, speed has been a major factor all along.

Re:ok, I'm biting... about this illiteracy...

[spisska]

Hear, hear.

Some figures:
Country, literacy rate in percent (world ranking)

Kazakhstan, 99.5 (29)
Ukraine, 99.4 (32)
Tonga, 98.9 (36)
Mongolia, 97.8 (47)
Argentina, 97.2 (53)
United States, 97 (55)
Thailand, 92.6 (72)
Zimbabwe, 90 (85)
Brazil, 88.4 (90)
Namibia, 85 (103)
Libya, 81.7 (111)

Source [wikipedia.org]
Discussion of Source accuracy [wikipedia.org]
UNDP Human Development Index Report, 2005 [undp.org] [pdf]

Re:Yay sweatshops!

[Zomad]

Quanta is a Taiwan company.

Re:Childrens laptop?

[tomstdenis]

The point is to remove the worth.

It's a 300MHz x86 board with a gray-scale display (the colour is faked), 128M of ram, 512M of flash, no cdrom, no advanced GPU, very small keys, and the host OS is designed for small children. Perfect for reading, playing simple learning games, and browsing the web. Sucks for games, videos, music and the like.

I seriously doubt there will be a huge black market for adults to hack them and turn them into a standard Linux PC. Selling them as is to children won't be really productive either. I'm not saying people won't try. I just doubt it will be very successful.

Tom

Re:black market

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.(Don't ya hate it when people correct you this way!)

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_market [laptop.org]

Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?

The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.

The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.

Re:Yay sweatshops!

[amerinese]

Yes, and not only that, but that Taiwan is NOT China is really important to its 23 million citizens. Taiwan is a democracy that has its own armies, controls its own borders, directly elects its own president, legislature... Sure, there are some reasons, unrelated to the fact that China constantly blares that it owns Taiwan and will p8wn Taiwan if Taiwan or anyone else says otherwise, but they are not good ones, and if there was ever a good guy--bad guy David vs. Goliath if you ever saw one situation, Taiwan is it. So please. Taiwan is NOT China. Quanta is a Taiwanese company that may happen to do a lot of business in China. Still, it is not the same thing and it's an important distinction to make.