When my daughter saw the OLPC, her face lit up. “What is that?” She immediately wanted to play with it. At 3.25 years old, she is well below the targeted age range, but she still loved the look and feel of it. She enjoyed the paint program although it is a little challenging still. She really got into the picture books at the OLPC library. And she was totally thrilled by the Recorder. I got a great clip of her singing her ABCs. She also really got into TamTamMini and had great fun making noise. She is a great stress tester because her approach is to hit all of the buttons and see what happens. This has caused some interesting desktop configurations under KDE and Gnome. For the most part, Sugar took everything she threw at it and shrugged it off, but she was able to crash TamTamMini by typing random characters in the Activity name field. It didn’t actually crash, it just stopped making music (noise).
It looks like there are enough activities to sustain her interest for quite some time to come.
Yay! The OLPC XO laptop arrived today. My husband called me at work to let me know that it is here. It is awesome, of course.
I added a page with more pictures of it than anyone could possibly want to see: OLPC pics.
Initial impressions – very small box that FedEx somehow managed to poke a hole in. Inside, very little extra packaging. It come in 3 pieces – the laptop itself, the battery and the power cord. There are 2 plastic bags and 2 stabilizers that look like they are made out of recycled paper/cardboard. It seems very rugged, but not rubbery as I was expecting. Under normal use by kids, I expect that the white will very quickly become dirty, but the thing looks awesome out of the box. As I’ve heard is common in adults, I didn’t initially get how to open it. As soon as I got it, it seems obvious. The display’s ability to completely swivel is cool. The fact that the USB, microphone, and headphone ports are covered by the antenna ears when closed is a sweet design point. It seems odd that the power port isn’t similarly protected. The keyboard is small and rubbery. People who like the old IBM clackety keyboards are destined to be disappointed – it is much like a normal laptop keyboard, only smaller, solid (protected from spills), rubbery, and green.
The software is neat. The extra keys on the keyboard really improve the software experience over trying the live ISO image or using a virtual machine image. They make switching between programs much easier and faster. The links back into the OLPC library allow the kids to listen to a couple of music samples, read nine picture books online (in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Farsi, and Croatian), and browse Wikipedia. The picture book interface is top notch and I hope they are able to populate the library with a few more books (initially you only see two, but once you start reading one, you can access another seven). I could really envision children as young as mine delving into this activity. I would have liked to see a link to Project Gutenberg. The science section starts off with only biology listings. I expect the OLPC library will grow dramatically over time.
The browser doesn’t automatically start Flash animations, but rather shows an outline with the designation: “Flash [[Click to play]]”. I tried a few of the Flash games on Noggin and gnash seems to not be able to really deal with most of them. For some, the screen gets so cluttered that the game becomes unplayable (which is a problem with Noggin’s site design rather than with the laptop) and others render but very slowly and seem to get stuck unable to accept input.
Pippy is a neat, small IDE preloaded with code snippets interesting enough to get older children motivated to try it. It takes me back to my early days of Basic programs generating annoying beeps. There is a cool distance measuring program (Acoustic Tape Measure) that requires two laptops to share the activity and then reports the distance between them.
On the security side, the SELinux tools and libraries are installed, but getenforce says that SELinux is disabled. I was prompted for my name when the machine booted for the first time and I selected an XO image with custom colors, but the second time I booted, neither were required. I haven’t quite figured out yet how to turn the microphone off and the microphone indicator has been lit for quite a while.
I’ve played with it for a couple of hours and barely scratched the surface. It is very fun. It will be interesting to see what my children make of it.
If you have read all the way to this point, you are an OLPC fanatic, so I highly recommend that you read the following two reviews. The first is by a 12 year old and is very well written. It talks about some of the more interesting activities that I haven’t had a chance to try yet, like Etoys and TamTamJam: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1206
The second review is by the father of a 9 year old: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7140443.stm
Also extremely cool, is the interview with the guy (Don Hopkins) who ported the original SimCity to the OLPC and is now releasing it under the GPL as Micropolis. I can still remember staying up all night in college playing SimCity in the 24 hour lab when I should have been sleeping (or working): http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/121107-simcity.html Head’s up – he says that there are cheat codes documented in the source. 
What a great way to get kids to read the source code. This will definitely be one of the first things that I load.
There is still a little time left to get one. I highly recommend it, it is a sweet little machine. But even more, as the letter confirming the expected arrival date of the laptop said: “You are part of something big. As a participant in Give One Get One, you have become a member of an international educational movement.” And that alone is worth every penny. http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php
IBM has announced [1] plans to contribute to the Mifos [2] open source microfinance software project. Microfinanciers loan small sums of money to the extremely poor to help them get businesses off the ground to improve not only the person who receives the loan, but the entire community. Kiva [3] while not affiliated with Mifos to my knowledge is one of the best known players in this space. It is a microfinance loan aggregator where individuals can loan small sums of money to projects that they select. The Mifos community seems to be quite well established and extremely active.
Benjamin Rosenbaum has an interesting blog post [4] (from way back in April) on how Grameen and Kiva fit relative to each other in the microfinance world and the benefits and limitations of microfinance.
Anyway, this looks like a great opportunity for both IBM and Mifos and I’m thrilled to see this announcement. This is the type of announcement that after almost 11 years with IBM, still makes me proud to be an IBMer.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/giving/12micro.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
[2] http://mifos.org/
[3] http://www.kiva.org/
[4] http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com/blog/archives/000474.html
This combination of stories makes me crazy:
Just as Good as Windows isn’t Good Enough [1]
Choice quotes: “In the end, if all else is equal, Windows get the nod because it is a safe choice. ” and “In this scenario, TCO does not come into play because ongoing support will be local and will come from other funding sources.”
A Little Laptop with Big Ambitions [2] (WSJ so no idea how long this will be available.)
Choice quotes: Last sentence in the article: “Just who would provide support a few years from now, he said, was ‘a frightening question.’ The students, he said, will need ‘to do as much maintenance as possible.’” and “Nigeria, for example, so far has failed to honor a pledge by its former president to purchase one million laptops.” and “It recently inked deals to sell hundreds of thousands of Classmates in Nigeria…”
and (though almost completely unrelated)
Software Group Targets Small Businesses
Choice quotes: “Of the $13 million that the BSA reaped in software violation settlements with North American companies last year, almost 90 percent came from small businesses, the AP found.” and “The letter demanded $67,000 — most of one year’s profit — or else the BSA would seek more in court. ‘It just scared the hell out of me,’” and and “some employees had been unable to open files with the firm’s drafting software, so they worked around it by installing programs they found on their own” and “‘It was basically just a lack of knowledge and sloppy record-keeping on my part,’ said Gaertner, who ended up with a settlement that cost him $40,000.”
First off, it really bugs me that none of the articles pick up on the educational opportunities of having the source code available and the OLPC feature of actually showing the student the code that is running at the moment. I guess this is just too geeky to be considered relevant to the politicians and journalists.
But really, there are three issues at work in these articles: support, piracy/TCO/license management, and security/safety.
On support, the WSJ article cites OLPC support as lacking, emphasizing the importance of this point by ending the article with it. Yet, there is no discussion on Classmate support and the ZDNet blogger posts that Classmate support will be “local” which doesn’t sound much better to me than the OLPC support. Plus teaching the students how to support the OLPC (both hardware and software) provides another educational opportunity for the kids.
On piracy (and the cost/complexity of managing software licenses), while I don’t expect the BSA to go after school kids worldwide, it wouldn’t really shock me if they did and they would conceivably be within their legal rights to do so. Who will manage the licenses for the software installed on the Classmates to ensure that they don’t run pirated software? Will the schools be responsible? The governments? The parents? The children? Will they implicitly allow piracy on the student laptops, training them to disregard the issue and then smack them down once the children grow up and start their own small businesses?
And finally, on security, while Windows is mentioned as being perceived as the “safe choice” (and while I hate to pick on Nigeria here), it just makes me cringe to imagine hundreds of thousands of Windows laptops out there with none of the thoughtful security improvements of the OLPC that will prevent them from becoming spambots.
[1] http://education.zdnet.com/?cat=65
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119586754115002717.html?mod=home_we_banner_left
[3] http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071126/software_watchdog.html?.v=2
Maker Faire was in Austin this past weekend and it was awesome! It was busy but not packed so it was quite pleasant and so there is a reasonable chance that we might see it again next year. (Please, please, please Maker Faire organizers, come back again soon!)
My father-in-law brought his MultiMachine – a general purpose all in one mill that can be made out of junk. He has quite an active Yahoo group so several people who were already familiar with the MultiMachine popped by to take a look. The number one comment was about how easy it looked to build. My father-in-law would really love to see non-profit orgs (NGOs) adopt the design of the machine and take it to distressed areas so that impoverished people could use it as a way to build things and generate income.
There were all kinds of creative and unique bicycles, robots, and musical instruments. There were several electric cars including a Prius conversion. There were yarn spinners, knitters and hand quilters. There was at least one blacksmith with an active forge. The feel of the conference was very open and generous. People were showing off their creations and sharing ways for attendees to learn to make their own. A big Thank you! to the kind woman who helped my 3 year old make her own necklace.
On topics of interest to this blog – open source, there was a very cool display by Rep Rap the Replicating Rapid Prototyper which has the ability to make itself. They say that it is a “practical self-copying 3D printer”. With this device you have the ability to create physical items for yourself and to share with your friends and you can even go a step farther and make another device to give to your friends, so that they can share the physical creations with their friends. Richard Stallman says “Software differs from material objectsâ€â€such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasolineâ€â€in that it can be copied and changed much more easily.” With Rep Rap, at least somethings can now be copied and changed almost as easily as software (though perhaps not yet sandwiches and gasoline).
[1] Maker Faire Blog at http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/maker_faire/
[2] Multi-machine Yahoo Group with a picture of the multi-machine at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/multimachine/
[3] Rep Rap at http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
