You can barely see it in the picture, against the green table top, but that’s the first of 1,000 Quanta XO 2B1 laptops to roll off the assembly line in Shanghai as part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative. The first 1,000 machines are set for rigorous environmental testing to simulate the harsh conditions they’ll eventually be used in. Tests will include dropping the XOs from various heights, children pounding on the keyboards, and making sure the encasements are dirt-and-dust resistant. Debug kits are also going out to developers to test out the apps that make up the notebooks’ OS. After this round of testing, the next units produced will go to school children in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand to get knocked around in real-life conditions as the final phase of testing before mass production begins in the summer of 2007. OLPC [wiki press site] → Read More
Remember back in the ’80s when Libya was a rogue nation, bent on war with the US? Not so much anymore. In fact, General el-Qaddafi has ponied up $250 million to make Libya the first nation to close a deal with the One Laptop Per Child program. That includes 1.2 million of the cute little WiFi-having laptops, one for every school kid in Libya. That is awesome. It also includes satellite Internet access, servers for every school, technical help and installation. The laptops come in at $150 each for the first units, which start production some time next year, with the prices dropping as production ramps up, hopefully hitting the $100 goal. The OLPC program is headed up by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT as a way to bridge the digital divide and bring non-Westernized countries up to par in the Information Age. In addition to supplying Libya’s children with the hand-cranked computers, Negroponte and el-Qaddafi discussed the possibility of Libya subsidizing similar programs for its poorer neighbors. This is indeed a new Libya, and its actions might hopefully get the ball rolling for other nations that have expressed interest, such as Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand. U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren [Seattle PI] → Read More
On October 2, One Laptop Per Child put out an open call to “hackers” to try and break the $100 laptops, named the 2B1, so they don’t hit the open market full of security holes. Apparently the comments made by Ivan Krstic at the Toorcon computer security convention (and reported by TG Daily) were off the record, though. Still TG is standing behind the accuracy of what it heard. OLPC invites hackers to test, break 2B1′s security systems [Engadget via TG Daily] → Read More
It was only last week that everyone reported the One Laptop Per Child project’s first laptop changed its name to the CM1, which stands for Children’s Machine 1. But now their official wiki has removed all references to CM1 and replaced it with “2B1 – The Children’s Machine”. Does “2B” stand for “to be”? In any case, the laptop still has a 7.5-inch, 1200×900 screen, video/still camera, three USB ports, SD slot, VoIP capabilities, 400MHz AMD Geode processor and 128MB of RAM. The price has gone up from $100 to $140, but it’s still cheap for everything that children will be getting. 2B1 [laptop.org via OLPCNews] → Read More
The One Laptop Per Child initiative announced today that it had named its first “$100 laptop” the Children’s Machine, aka the CM1. Each unit will feature a 400Mhz AMD Geode processor, a 7.5″ LCD display and will be mesh network compliant. It will also include VoIP and an SD slot. The CM1 is physically for completely remote areas in that it is physically powered by a drawstring generator. So there you have it, OLPC has now named their first $140 laptop, some more nonconsequential news from the company. I’d genuinely like to see this product come to fruition, but at times it seems pretty questionable. The information changes almost weekly and its often doubtful that it will ever make it to production–I really hope that’s not the case. The Children’s Machine (CM1) from One Laptop per Child [OLPC News via Engadget] → Read More
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