Some movement on OLPC

A day or so after my post on "Problems with the $100 laptop" an interesting event happened. I'm posting from the World Summit on Information Technology, where OLPC is introducing the laptop. They have a balsa model with a keyboard and an LCD with a thick cable attached to a box under the counter, and Mary Lou Jeppsen, the LCD designer and the chief engineer right now, makes no bones about it not being ready yet. They seem to have added a crank about 6 inches long, made of flat balsa wood pieces.

I have been told that they now claim that the crank will have a 3:1 (instead of 100:1) ratio of crank time to running time. That's much more reasonable from a power calculation standpoint, but not appetizing for users who plan to leave their laptops on 24hrs/day (for mesh networking support). So I went searching for the original statement to show a friend. No dice. The only place you'll find it is in the post in this blog. In fact, there's no mention on the Media Lab web page http://laptop.media.mit.edu of power generation at all!

Now, I know I've seen it in printed articles, so they can't deny they said it. But they did a pretty good job of erasing their tracks on the web (somewhere it has to be in a cache, but caches get updated). I consider this a vindication. But it's also a validation of another point I want to make in better detail.

At a technical conference just before leaving for Tunis, I was on the panel of a session talking about the laptop. There I heard for the first time that the intended use of the laptop was to replace school textbooks. Since textbooks were said to cost up to $20, just 5 uses would break even! I made the point that having a continuously alterable textbook was not something from which I want to have schoolchildren studying. Especially when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is one of the funders.

Can you say "propaganda"?

Lee Felsenstein

Comments

[Kragen Sitaker]

I was surprised when I recently took apart a broken Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop LCD screen to find no RGB color filters --- instead, it had two diffraction gratings. I think this laptop was from 2000 or so.

[Scott]

After bilking the Irish taxpayers of €40 million, you'd think that people wouldn't pay a lot of attention to Negroponte and the MIT mafia...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/04/mit_media_lab_ireland/

[anonymous]

Hi Lee,

Great series of postings on the OLPC!

For what it's worth, ArsTechnica says that Negroponte is now advertising a 30:1 (not 3:1) crank ratio:

"one minute of cranking will provide 30 minutes of use"

The writer added 'though this did not factor in wireless usage'.

(ArsTechnica, US$100 laptop unveiled, 11/17/2005 3:43:01 PM, by Charles Jade).

[symbee]

I agree with your sentiments here. I don't actually believe the $100 PC is even needed.

There seems to be an assumption that there is a digital divide which people in the 3rd World can't survive without the trappings of 1st World life.

The fact is if you are living on $1 US dollar per month that may not be a negative factor for an individual if all you require in life is food, shelter, and prospects of living a better sustained lifestyle.

Of course there are caste levels within society, regardless of nation, where there are those who barely survive. Would giving that individual a $100 computer improve that persons life? I can't answer that for certain but I will say if that was me, i'd sell the $100 computer and by a cow.

[Lee Felsenstein]

Sorry, I misspelled Mary Lou Jepsen's name (one "p", not two) in the post.

Mary Lou is an incredibly good display designer, and I eagerly look forward to her efforts in this case. She's doing a direct view (not projection) display with some kind of diffraction principle instead of red-blue-green color filters. This will vastly decrease the loss of light coming through, and give a high-density black-and-white display when the diffraction effect is not used.

If anyone can do it, it's Mary Lou. We're all waiting for it.

Lee