XO Laptops Go Next to Haiti
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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation is teaming with another group on a pilot project distributing more laptops.
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Even in hard times, Haitians go to the movies. Now they're also making them in record numbers &#151; about 10 feature films a year &#151; rivaling Cuba as the Caribbean's biggest movie producer and often outselling better-financed imports.
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If the One Laptop Project keeps its promises, the small green US$100 laptop could very well revolutionize teaching in developing nations. Computerworld Denmark asked Jan Soelberg, an expert from the school of education at the University of Aarhus, to try the computer.
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The popular "give one, get one" program in which U.S. buyers paying $400 both received their own XO "One Laptop per Child" unit and donated one to a needy kid internationally may be extended to Europe in 2008, OLPC president Walter Bender says.
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Both business travelers and kids in remote villages in developing nations need cheap, small, rugged and power-stingy laptops. So does the OLPC XO laptop work for business users?
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The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its&#160;low-cost XO laptops: cows.&quot;We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle,&quot; wrote OLPC&#39;s Arjun Sarwal, in an e-mail dated Oct. 21 and posted to one of the group&#39;s discussion lists.Sarwal and others are now finalizing the design of the cow-powered generator.The goal is to develop a low-cost energy source that can be used in Indian villages. Working in a village close to Mumbai, Sarwal said the group considered using solar energy but sunlight near Mumbai was not &quot;consistently strong.&quot; There was not enough wind or running water nearby to use these as sources of power, and the cost of running a gas-powered motor was too high.&quot;But the village had an abundance of cattle that were being used in the fields. So we decided to design something around that,&quot; Sarwal wrote in a subsequent e-mail.The dynamo used in the system was taken from a Fiat car that is commonly used as taxis in Mumbai and therefore both cheap and readily available.OLPC is close to putting its XO laptop into production, but has been beset by delays and rising costs. Originally intended to cost $100 each, the&#160;cost has since risen to nearly $200. And production is also moving slowly.After a trial production run in August, OLPC had hoped to start mass production in late September or early October. That date has now slipped to Nov. 12, according to a Reuters report that quoted the group&#39;s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen.
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has raised the price of its XO laptop to US$188, according to an Associated Press report.
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Buy a Toshiba PC, and get some XDR memory.
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The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) computer, which uses a version of Linux, might soon be available with Windows. According to a Reuters report, a Microsoft corporate vice president has said that the software giant is working to adapt Windows XP for the low-cost XO laptop.
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The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow this week, with Chief Technology Officer Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC.Jepsen, who joined OLPC as its first employee in 2005 after Nicholas Negroponte started the effort, will pursue an opportunity to chase after &quot;her next miracle in display technology,&quot; OLPC said in an e-mail sent on Sunday.Jepsen was responsible for hardware and display development for the rugged and power-saving&#160;XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its innovative hardware features and environmentally friendly design.Her last day with the organization is Dec. 31, though she will continue consulting with OLPC, according to the e-mail. Dec. 31 is also the end of OLPC&#39;s Give One Get One program, in which two XO laptops can be purchased for about $400, with a user getting one laptop and the other being donated.Satisfied that XO laptops were shipping in volume, Jepsen noted in an e-mail that she was starting a for-profit company to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC.&quot;I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit,&quot; Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.&quot;I believe that the work I led in the design of the XO laptop is just the first step in changing computing,&quot; she wrote.Powered by solar power, foot pedal or pull-string, the laptop doesn&#39;t rely on an electrical outlet to run, making it useful for situations where power is unreliable or unavailable. The laptop&#39;s specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery consumes between 2 watts to 8 watts depending on usage, compared to 40 watts on commercial laptops depending on usage.The laptop&#39;s battery lasts up to 21 hours because of custom-designed, efficient power-saving features implemented at the hardware and software level. Batteries in commercial laptops may explode at high temperatures, while XO&#39;s batteries can run and recharge in temperatures around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), Jepsen said in earlier interview.OLPC is also designing a cow-powered generator that works by hooking cattle up to a system of belts and pulleys.For connectivity, the laptop has mesh-networking features for Internet access.
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The so-called "$100 laptop" has moved one step closer to reality, with 2,500 units set to ship later this month to eight developing nations. If the small test proves successful, mass production of the units would begin.
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A computer developed for the world's  poor children, dubbed "the $100 laptop," has reached a  milestone: It is now selling for $200.
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AMD had an OLPC laptop on hand to showcase the fact that its Geode processor powers the device designed for emerging markets
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One Laptop Per Child project leader encouraging wealthy countries to buy $100 laptops for poor economies.
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Performance boost in handheld devices is obtained using Power6 server technology.
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A low-cost laptop, designed for children in developing countries, will go on sale in North America.
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The&#160;One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC)&#160;and Microsoft are working together to develop a dual-boot system to put both Linux and Windows on laptops aimed at kids in developing countries, the head of OLPC said in an interview Tuesday.&quot;We are working with them very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that&#39;s up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it&#39;s very, very successful. We&#39;re working very hard to do both,&quot; said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC.It&#39;s a brand new development for the XO laptops, as the low-cost notebooks are known, and came about because of Microsoft&#39;s friendlier attitude towards open source software.Microsoft has embraced the open source community over the past few years in a very different way than before, Negroponte said. &quot;And that really helps, because it&#39;s become a little bit less religious than it was a few years ago and that&#39;s really good. In the end, I think, the more people that have software and hardware out there, the better.&quot;The OLPC laptop currently runs a Fedora-based Linux OS, and&#160;Microsoft has offered a version of Windows XP for the laptop project. There had been speculation that OLPC would simply offer two separate laptop PCs, but a dual-boot system could remove the need to offer two separate laptops. Such a device could also reduce the need to have competing low-cost laptops -- running Linux or Windows -- in the marketplace. Taiwan&#39;s Asustek Computer has already launched an ultra-low cost laptop PC capable of running Windows XP, and executives at the company have touted XP compatibility as an advantage over the XO.OLPC is also working with Microsoft and possibly the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation on combining OLPC laptops with some of the educational programs run by Microsoft in developing countries.&quot;There is talk in that direction and it&#39;s directly with Bill and [Microsoft chief research and strategy officer] Craig Mundie , especially this morning, so this is really cooking at the moment,&quot; Negroponte said.Microsoft has launched programs in a number of developing countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, where it works with governments to build computer labs and Microsoft employees donate time to train people on how to use software and write programs.The OLPC Project started as an attempt to build a $100 laptop and work with governments to pass them out to kids in poor nations, but the laptop from the group, the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount at first. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope high-volume sales of the device will drive down costs.The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how software, the Internet and communications via computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers.&#160;