BBC on XO
BBC News has a piece, Factfile: XO laptop, on the current form of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) machine being developed by Nicholas Negroponte and MIT Media Lab. It’s proving to be a long and parlous road to final release and distribution: Intel recently got on board (AMD makes the XO chip at the moment) which may swamp the non-profit canoe, and there’s been constant criticism from just about every quarter.
I have to say, though, that it looks to be a sweet machine. It boasts wi-fi and the ability of one machine to connect to others nearby and so to share a single internet connection among a number of machines, practically no moving parts at all, a flash memory, a Linux-based operating system with a very small footprint, a waterproof keyboard, and many other features retailed in the BBC article. I’m also impressed by the constancy of vision the developers have demonstrated and the persistence with which they’ve progressed towards their goal of worldwide distribution.
I would probably have been ashamed to tell you that I’ll get one as soon as I can, if it hadn’t been announced (I’ve lost the source) that we in the rich world will be able to buy one for the price of two.
Earlier this summer, I heard Jesse Dymond speak at the Sacred and Secular conference in London on the Stewardship of Technology.
He had one of these babies up close and personal, and I got to play with it for a while.
Because it uses shareware, they keep the cost down to about $100. But they don’t sell to the general public, and as far as I know they don’t plan on doing so.
There are comparable retail models, but they’re not nearly as cheap and obviously only use components that they can monetize upon.
But the potential of this going to the mass markets of the developing world is incredible. The Internet is currently dominated by N Americans; even Europeans are pretty far behind. And maybe, just maybe, we can start having people on opposite sides of the world actually talking to each other instead of living in mutual fear.