The fact that Intel does not WANT to lower prices does not mean that they COULD NOT do it. If it weren't for Intel and Microsoft's monopoly on the PC/Laptop market, we would have had $50 Laptops that run 20 hours on a battery by now, with instant on and free wireless broadband worldwide.

ARM Cortex A8 at 600Mhz performs better than Intel Atom at 800Mhz for loading Javascripts on HTML websites. Intel Atom 800mhz consumes more than 1W ARM Cortex A8 600mhz consumes less than 350mW

Most other components of a computer follow Moores law as well, some other components evolve even faster than Moores law like certain storage technologies.

If you can double the amount of transistors per chip every 18 months, then you can also halve the size of the same amount of transistors. Thus you CAN halve the price every 18 months. The reason Intel isn't halving the price of their processors every 18 months is not because they cannot, it's because they don't want to. Doing whatever it takes to keep the prices high is the speciality of Intel. Old slower processors are being DISONTINUED by Intel before they are able to be manufactured for cheaper. Just look at the average cost of processors sold by Intel. They kept the average sold processor costs steady between 2000 and 2007, and since the netbooks of 2007, the average price per processor sold by Intel has nearly halved.

The hardware may have problems, but you can't expect it to work better, given AMD did not support the project well enough to keep Geode up to date with the latest cost efficient components. And given OLPC only could afford the amount of engineers working full time that they could afford.

I absolutely don't see where Nicholas Negroponte should have been complaining about the Linux core developed by Ivan Kristic and the other engineers.

Although I am NOT an engineer and I do not know the details of what the actual work has been to make XO-1, I think Ivan Kristic is suffering from some type of frustration having done IMMENSE work, being the software genius that he is, but simply not having had the ressources required to realize all the visions perfectly thus far. And somehow feeling perhaps that his brilliant Bitfrost security mechanisms don't work yet as are intended.

That might lead to the choice Ivan Kristic then made to work for a much larger company Apple. Apple definitely has the ressources in those $20 Billion they have in the bank, to give Ivan whatever he needs to make his visions work.

The difference between having 12 engineers working with or for you (if Ivan was or wanted to be the CTO), and potentially 200 at Apple, means all the difference for him if he has to hack at code all by himself at OLPC with insanely tight deadlines that are always pushed back or to work more comfortably at Apple, get much more sleep, be much better paid.

Anyways, I'd much prefer if they'd all just agree that the evil is not within OLPC but that it has always been that the rest of the world does not let the OLPC vision become reality just that easily. And that it will take more punches to the industry to make it work for the Children and not only for the banks and shareholders.

OLPC has NEVER added things to please Microsoft.

Nicholas Negroponte has always argued that OLPC would only work towards Open Firmware supporting Windows on the laptops. Because he ALWAYS talked about Dual-boot support if ANY Windows Support at all!!!

Windows-only machines would never had been supported by OLPC funds.

Some Governments demand Windows support on the machines before they invest millions of dollars into such a project. That is why OLPC has worked on the open source Open Firmware ONLY, NOT ON THE HARDWARE, to support an eventual Windows port dual-bootable from a USB stick or from an SDHC card.

I hate Microsoft just as anyone else on Slashdot. Yet I also really hate when Linux fans act like complete idiots and bash on the worlds single BEST Linux hardware project EVER. Just because their totally open hardware somehow supports a Windows port also which Microsoft invested a lot of engineers for more than a year to have it working.

As much as I hate Microsoft, I would LOVE IT if Bill Gates announced tomorrow that he will finance $1 Billion to ship 5 million XO-1.5 in Africa running Windows (if he insists) but totally Linux dual-boot compatible as well, since THAT IS HOW OLPC MAKES THEM (providing each class with Linux USB sticks to either install a Linux dual-boot or to replace Windows eventually is easy).

Nah, XO1 is sluggish with Linux as well. OLPC did not change any hardware to accomodate Microsoft. The main problem with the XO is that AMD did not help much improving the Geode processor to fit with more cost effective RAM and Flash memory components.

But in 2007, OLPC did not really have a choice. Intel was crapping on the whole project with all its monopolistic corporate clout, and ARM processors did perhaps not seem ready enough for it.

I could perhaps argue, and I think I did ask the question often, why OLPC wasn't directly choosing the ARM processor back then in 2006-2007 for XO-1, I would have argued even an ARM11 processor would have been good enough.

Though, if you had to choose X86, I don't think OLPC did any mistakes in terms of hardware choices. Intel are absolutely impossible to work with and would have never wanted the netbook market to grow as fast as it is. Intel's profits are down 95% in 2008 compared to 2007 because of the netbooks cannibalizing the sales of more expensive processors in more expensive laptops.

"bending the specs to fit Windows"

That is BS. The specs were updated from 128MB RAM to 256MB RAM, not for Windows only, but for Linux as well. Same thing for the 1GB storage instead of 512MB.

With XO-1.5 they are improving the processor significantly upwards 1Ghz, with 4GB storage and much better DDR2 RAM memory. All this without increasing the cost, because VIA simply supports their new processor better and AMD has stopped developping for Geode years ago and don't support those latest cheaper and better components.

Last, your complaint about commercialization of OLPC to rich people like you. OLPC cannot do that cause they are a non profit. If you have them products on your market, you have them having to give 25% to resellers, paying for transportation, taxes, and none of the components would have been provided in the same way. And volunteers would not have contributed to the project in the same way.

AMD could have found some OEM and some brand to sell commercial versions of it if they wanted. But they did not want to. The commercial versions of OLPC are the Intel based netbooks. Those Intel based netbooks WOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED if it weren't for OLPC forcing Intel into that market.

Being a non-profit, OLPC's goals are not only to build and sell laptops themselves, but most importantly to influence THE WHOLE MARKET. Which OLPC so far has done amazingly well and will continue to do with VIA based XO-1.5 and especially with ARM based XO-2 coming soon with Chrome OS probably.

Basically you read Ivan Kristic's post, he starts off saying he's always been against the Sugar UI.

Where in Nicholas Negroponte's interview does it say he thinks that the core Linux hardware/software development was the mistake?

Where in Nicholas Negroponte's interviews does he say he thinks Windows support on the XO is better than optimized Linux?

Talking about working for the evil empire, I'd say Ivan Kristic working for Apple should not have too much to brag about.

He's a genius for sure, and the work OLPC engineers have done for XO-1 was simply amazing considering the very small amount of engineers employed by OLPC, but I simply don't get why Ivan doesn't simply recognize that an open platform like XO simply cannot and should not try to block Microsoft from doing whatever they want if they want to port Windows XP for the unit as well.

Simply put, how can Ivan be working like this on an OPEN X86 based project and then demand that Microsoft not be allowed to port their Windows OS to it?

You guys a so wrong. OLPC is alive and strong. A million children are using it every day, and that number is increasing steadilly. Quit talking about it in the past tense.

Mesh networking is crucial to OLPC:

- Children in poor areas with NO internet connection can still collaborate on projects, share data.

- Children in poor areas with LITTLE internet connection, can all share the same hotspot thus providing much cheaper Internet access, down towards $0.20 per child per month. This works.

ARM Processors consume ALOT less power than X86. With ARM you are talking milliwatts of power used to run the laptop, not watts.

OLPC always said they'd reach the $100 price point by selling many millions of laptops. Initial goal was at least sell 6 million units to reach that price goal. Now, with "only" 1 million units sold, and an unsupported AMD Geode based hardware that uses non-optimized anymore components, you can't expect them to be able to lower the price.

Though OLPC is launching XO-1.5 based on the VIA processor in the next few weeks or months as you can see in the videos on my http://olpc.tv/ Using this new lower power VIA processor, OLPC can speed it up 4x as well and still lower the cost and lower the power consumption.

You complainers about Windows support need to learn that it's BECAUSE OLPC is an open platform that Microsoft is able to port Windows XP for it. You are completely ridiculous not understanding that for OLPC to not support Windows XP, they would have had to build a closed proprietary system. Since specs of XO are opened, and it's X86 based, Microsoft is obviously able to read the specs on the Wiki and build a port of Windows XP for it. It's just plain stupid to keep asking for OLPC to somehow block Microsoft.

Give 1 Get 1 program was not a failure at all. Tens of thousands of laptops were given for free in dozens of countries. To create those dozens of hundred or thousand-laptop OLPC pilot projects. Those projects would not have been financed if it wasn't for the G1G1 program.

Now sure, you can critisize OLPC for not having found more money if you want. I find it that considering they are just a 30-employee non-profit, finding $200 million to fund those 1 million first XO laptops is pretty decent achievement no matter what. Sure, I'd prefer if they had access to billions of dollars to help millions more children get laptops. People in rich countries are greedy, they only care to pay for stuff that they can get for themselves.

Also, to reach those 100 million children, OLPC needs to have more than just a couple dozen engineers working on the whole optimizations of hardware and software for the project.

What OLPC managed to build in XO1 and XO-1.5 with 30 employees and the little budget that they could get is absolutely amazing.

But what OLPC probably needs for XO-2 to absolutely work and sell laptops soon at $50 to revolutionize education worldwide, is thousands of engineers and the support from Barack Obama and the European Union.

So OLPC's political agenda definitely needs to be more targeted towards the politics of education and aid of the USA and Europe and with much more ambition to make things happen in huge scale as quickly as possible.

Quit posting about OLPC being a failure. It is absolutely not.

Thanks to OLPC, we have soon 50 million netbooks in rich countries.

Thanks to OLPC, children have soon millions of cheap lower power laptops in poor countries.

Thanks to OLPC, the PC/Laptop industry's interpretation of Moore's law has totally been reshaped, every 18month now PC/laptops will be half the price instead of 2x more powerful and with 2x more bloatware.

Sure, I would have been happier, and so would most other Linux geeks if OLPC had shipped 100 million laptops to poor children by now, and not just 1 million units. Reason for that not happening yet in multi-hundred million scales though are several:

1. Intel will do anything it can not to be killed off by a non-profit laptop technology revolution. Including abusing of monopolistic situations and corrupting politicians.

2. AMD is not much interested in helping OLPC succeed in lowering the cost of laptops and PCs. Lower cost also means less profits and margins for AMD, and AMD has enough problems with profits and margins as it is.

Looking forward, to reach those 100 million poor children sooner rather than later:

1. OLPC needs to find an alternative to AMD as soon as possible. VIA is planned for XO-1.5 which could hopefully ship a few millions of units in a few months time, if VIA supports this move of OLPC creating a cheaper and lower power market using their processor. XO-1.5 could reach the $150 pricepoint soon and enable dozens of commercial netbooks using the VIA processor and also copying on the way OLPC is using the VIA processor.

2. OLPC needs to implement the worlds best ARM processor based laptops for XO-2 working with Google to implement the so called Chrome OS on those. Cloud computing can work also for places without stable internet access, HTML5 supports offline web apps and offline databases. OLPC needs to push Google to make it work on WiFi Mesh networks as well. XO-2 can start at $100 when released and reach the $50 price point, when manufactured using any of half a dozen ARM processor companies chips. All of TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Nvidia and Samsung, all those ARM processors should fit in the XO-2 design. Competition will bring the prices down faster.

Well if you don't like Sugar, you can just follow one of many online tutorials to install any of many other Linux distributions on it.