OLPC, Microsoft working on dual-boot XO laptop
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A forthcoming version of the OLPC's XO laptop could have the ability to boot both Linux and Windows, according to the OLPC's founder.
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Dual-core microprocessors won&#39;t mean doubled software license fees, according to an announcement by Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
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Blog: One Laptop per Child (OLPC) announces final beta version for its $100 XO laptop.
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Product will allow a server to run multiple operating systems, or multiple copies of the same operating system at a single time
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Microsoft Corp. said Monday it will share technology with Linux distributor Xandros Inc., the latest in a string of deals meant to help the patent-protected Windows operating system work more smoothly with open-source programs.
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According to Intel, the OLPC not only asked Intel to stop working on its own low-cost laptop projects that competed with the OLPC's XO laptop, it also asked Intel to stop supplying chips to other partners, like Asus, working on similar designs.
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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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Flash memory stick makers are showing off USB (Universal Serial Bus) drives at Computex that have been certified to work with Windows Vista&#39;s ReadyBoot and ReadyBoost functions, which improve boot-up times and the software start-up speeds in PCs.
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(InfoWorld) - On Monday, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)Â moved a step closer to providing low-cost laptops to children in developing nations by giving the go-ahead to the mass production of its XO laptop. However, the computers are expected to be out in October, one month later than originally planned. Right now, the OLPC prices are at $176 per laptop, with the price expected to go down to $100 sometime next year, according to a public relations spokesman for the project. There will be 3 million laptops available in October, and they will be distributed to children by the governments of participating countries, which to date include: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Tunisia, the United States, and Uruguay. OLPC is a nonprofit project formed by Nicholas Negroponte that intends to give specially designed low-cost notebooks to children who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to purchase or use them. It is supported by several high-profile technology companies, such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which is providing the laptop's processors, and Red Hat, which helped design the "Sugar" user interface. Both companies and others involved in OLPC such as Brightstar, Google, News Corp., and Nortel NetworksÂ have donated $2 million each to the project. The laptops in production are based on the XO Beta-4 (B4) engineering model, which is designed to be durable and withstand diverse and potentially harsh environmental conditions that might be found in developing countries. The display of the machine is fully readable in bright sunlight, and the machines are designed to operate even in areas where access to electricity is limited through the ability to be powered by alternative power sources such as a solar panel. Before they are released, the XO B4 laptops will go through a final round of testing by developers, hardware experts, OLPC technical volunteers, and some of the pilot schools around the world already using the B2 machines, according to the OLPC project.
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PC Magazine - The OEM also broadens the virtualization capabilities of the high-end systems by adding greater support for Windows.
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Alternative browser will be available on portable devices running Microsoft's OS.
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Microsoft Corp. is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux Inc. to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users.
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Mary Lou Jepsen stirred up a controversy when she left the struggling One Laptop Per Child nonprofit effort in December to start her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi, with the goal to create a $75 laptop using technologies she invented at OLPC.Jepsen&#39;s departure as CTO prompted critics to accuse her of taking advantage of OLPC&#39;s nonprofit inventions for personal gain, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a listing ship. OLPC has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs over years, with the laptop&#39;s estimated price rising from $100 to $188. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors like Intel that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.Jepsen denied the allegations, saying her departure was put in place early last year and that she continues to work with OLPC on developing technologies for future XO laptops while selling it for a profit to commercial organizations.Technologies she invented at OLPC include the display system optimized for low-power operation, which has been implemented in the XO laptop.Retaining the OLPC spirit, Jepsen said Pixel Qi is developing inexpensive products like a power-efficient display that can be used in developing countries. She chatted with the IDG News Service about the new company, the $75 laptop, and her days at OLPC.IDGNS: How is Pixel Qi progressing?Jepsen: Things are going great. Pixel Qi is now a month old. I&#39;ve done a lot of startups before, but [Pixel Qi] is a very unusual startup. It&#39;s got products to ship already, so that&#39;s unusual. It&#39;s getting a lot of attention, which surprises me, but it is good that people are interested.IDGNS: Are you working on the $75 laptop right now?Jepsen: The $75 laptop -- maybe people are interested in it because it&#39;s a catch phrase -- but mostly it&#39;s about designing things for the billions of people who are joining the information age right now. That&#39;s what Pixel Qi strongly believes in.Right now I&#39;m starting this company ... to get a lot of the technologies in [OLPC&#39;s XO] laptop into other laptops and cell phones as a first priority. Then working with OLPC to focus on driving that next-generation laptop. But we just started shipping this generation [of XO laptops], we owe it to ourselves to see how the children use them ... and before we start in earnest the design and development cycle to have the feedback from children in different countries.I&#39;m focused on getting the screens and power management into other people&#39;s small laptops and cell phones right now. I think the [$75 laptop] will happen pretty soon, but again, I&#39;m not really focused on the $75 laptop right now, while the innovations that I&#39;m working on can go into that.That mimics what we did at OLPC. We thought a lot about [designing the XO laptop] before executing on it. It&#39;s a lot easier to redesign on paper. [We are] taking this time and really talking to a lot of who&#39;s who in technology about what [the $75 laptop] should be. But it&#39;s certainly possible to go lower price -- if you look, there are $10 CPUs around.IDGNS: There is a perception that you left OLPC to privatize the technology and make money out of it.Jepsen: I arranged it with Nicholas [Negroponte]. My departure has been well planned and organized with OLPC. It was in place since spring of 2007, and I was committed to delivering the XO into high-volume mass production. But as somebody who ... invents, develops, and gets hardware into mass production, there wasn&#39;t much more for me to do at OLPC after ... that.On some level, I was responsible for making a laptop ... and, I realized ... I should keep doing this. So I got access to the ... intellectual property and patents. Not because I was the inventor, and not even because the inventor has the really good chance of improving the price and performance of her invention, but because OLPC is the beneficiary as the licensee.I&#39;m still in spirit with OLPC, but now I&#39;m with Pixel Qi, and I am not working on just children, but adults and trying to get the cost down. That doesn&#39;t mean just Dell on a diet if you will, but [a laptop] that people are proud to own and proud to use at low cost and designed for different environments. The mass market -- there&#39;s literally billions of people who want to join this information age, and they need products too. They need interesting products, not stripped-down stuff. The XO is probably the first in that line.IDGNS: A $75 computer seems optimistic considering OLPC&#39;s inability to produce a $100 laptop. Can you walk us through the changes needed in component prices and system design to reach that target?Jepsen: I don&#39;t think it&#39;s that hard, frankly. If you look at the cost of flash and DRAM, they go down 50 percent year over year. You look at screens, they go down 30 percent every year. If you look at the cost of CPUs -- well, some of them stay expensive -- there are several companies working on the $10 CPU right now.There are pretty low-cost [parts], but using low power, guess what ... you don&#39;t use the same amount of ... processing power. Your battery is really inexpensive if you don&#39;t use a lot of power because it won&#39;t need as many cells, for example. I think it&#39;s very straightforward.There&#39;s ways to hit ...[the $75] envelope if you look at the mechanicals and the keyboards and everything else you need on the motherboard. I think we know how to ... integrate the components and work with manufacturers and producers to get there very quickly to lowering the price and increasing the performance. But then again, you have to redefine performance for a cow herder and pick your country.IDGNS: All of that still calls for performance. Is there going to be some kind of trade-off in capabilities relative to a mainstream notebook?Jepsen: There&#39;s two ways to be fast, one is the standard, more blah way, where you just heap on the megahertz and megahertz and then heap on the code. Vista&#39;s footprint is 12GB as opposed to our OS at OLPC, it&#39;s 0.1GB, it&#39;s 120 times smaller. You could do big code and big iron or skinny down the code and make do with a 500 megahertz processor ... that was a state-of-the-art laptop in 2000. All of the software has gotten bloated, and do you really need a little paper clip guy or doggy telling you what to do?The XO is ... an outdoor usable laptop. You can drop it, you can spill on it and the batteries last a long time. And it&#39;s green. Those are performance metrics that really matter. Making your batteries last a week is also a performance criteria. Intel has said for a number of years that it&#39;s not about&#160;one more megahertz anymore, it&#39;s about lowering the power consumption.IDGNS: Are inexpensive laptops a new category? IDC says notebook computers like Eee PC -- they don&#39;t take those laptops when they measure market share or measure unit shipments. They&#39;re calling the category &quot;notebook gadgets.&quot; How do you feel about that?Jepsen: It&#39;s funny. I don&#39;t feel much about the word. I just talked at a gadget conference, &quot;Greener Gadgets,&quot; but ... [Intel&#39;s] Craig Barrett, when he was trying to be derogatory toward the laptop project, called it a gadget. I think that we think of gadgets as things that don&#39;t really work for long, have a short life, and are transient, not real machines. The XO lasts two-and-a-half times longer than a standard laptop. That&#39;s not a gadget-like property of it. What is a gadget? Is it a learning machine or is your laptop a gadget or cell phone a gadget?IDGNS: Did Intel undermine the OLPC project with their Classmate PC?Jepsen: It&#39;s such a long story with them, especially for me because I used to work [at Intel]. It&#39;s hard for me to summarize. Certainly, there are so many individuals at that company on the technical side when we finally got working together, it was great. We were really pursuing an -- I think it&#39;s been announced -- Intel chip in the XO, that was something we were working well together on with their technical team. I think the difficulty was from the sales and marketing side as I understand it, and I really wasn&#39;t involved in that in OLPC. I would only hear from the ministers in the countries I would visit and from Nicholas and so forth. I wasn&#39;t that involved in it towards the end.IDGNS: Is there a release date for the $75 laptop?Jepsen: It&#39;s not that hard. It will take about two years. Realistically, it does need that time because what you have to do first is make the components and then you put them together. At OLPC, it took&#160;three years because we had to start with the disbelief, but now people believe. Now cut that down to about two years, it&#39;s about reasonable. It&#39;s 2010 we&#39;re looking at.
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Is Microsoft working on building a laptop for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program? Yes, but the intended machine will run Windows XP only, rather than both Windows XP and Linux, Microsoft officials said today.
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(InfoWorld) - With Vista just out the door, MicrosoftÂ is now drawing up plans to deliver its follow-up client operating system by the end of 2009, according to the executive in charge of building the product's core components. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP, but Vista was exceptional, said Ben Fathi, corporate vice president of development with Microsoft's Windows Core Operating System Division this week at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco. Microsoft originally planned for its XP follow-up to include a number of radical changes to Windows, including a new file system and a reinvented user interface, but after the company's products were hit by widespread worm outbreaks in 2003, Microsoft redirected almost its entire engineering effort to locking down Windows with the XP Service Pack 2 release. "We put Longhorn on the back burner for awhile," Fathi said. "Then when we came back to it, we realized that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn't deliver in one release." Vista shipped about two-and-a-half years after XP SP 2, and Vista's follow-up is expected to take about the same amount of time, according to Fathi. "You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with," he said. "That's a good timeframe for refresh." That time line would put Microsoft's next client operating system out by the end of 2009. Last year, Microsoft said that the code name for this Vista follow-up is Vienna, but Fathi said he could not disclose the current name. "We've been told not to use it publicly," he said. So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna? According to Fathi, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don't know what it is," he said. "Maybe it's a new user interface paradigm for consumers." "It's too early for me to talk about it," he added. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
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Chipzilla backs crappy AMD-based laptop You can usually gauge how thrilled Intel is with a given announcement by examining the length of its associated news release. Today, we find Intel joining the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program and managing a grand total of five paragraphs to tout the achievement.â¦
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Microsoft is to begin field tests of Windows XP working on the so-called $100 laptop, or XO, early in 2008.