This effort emerged as a way to capture the endless momentum of Moore's Law and create a laptop for those far on the other side of the digital divide—the poor children of the world and their families. In fact, the vast majority of the world lives without so many of the things we consider essential, not least of which is access to education and information. This year, we intend to launch with millions of laptops simultaneously in Rwanda, Pakistan, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Libya, Nigeria, and Thailand. The children themselves will own these laptops, which will be distributed to them by the Ministries of Education. They should last for five years and are cheaper than five years' worth of textbooks in the average developing country.
For the first year, she was the only technical person. (There are thousands of people involved now.)
Go to wiki.laptop.org & dev.laptop.org.
Look up the "hole in the wall" study in India.
If you can make a laptop cheap enough, they're cheaper than textbooks. About the size of book, and it lasts for 5 years.
Everything is about scale. In May 2005, they decided to go non-profit, mainly for clarity of purpose. They want to maximize the number of units shipped, not profit margins.
Most countries are onboard, except for a few (e.g. North Korea).
The laptops require 10-20, volts <1.75 amps.
Chi Mei, in southern Taiwan, makes the displays (and most of the rest of the laptops as well). Quanta Computer is actually the largest laptop maker in the world.
80% of the schools in some of the coutries have no power; some of them have no building, either.
These laptops are the greenest laptops on the planet. Some of the
largest manufacturers in the world told her that it would cost her
an extra $10, $20, $40 per laptop to be envrionmentally friendly.
They were wrong; it doesn't have to. Their laptops will probably be
the first laptop to achieve the EP Gold
rating (even though
it doesn't dictate how long the laptop will last).
The secret to really low power consumption is to turn stuff off that you're not using. The average power consumption is about 2 watts.
They came up with a new battery chemistry: lithium-ferro phosphate. It burns at 100 Celsius, unlike lithium ion, which burns at 1000 Celsius.
Libya is probably one of the hottest places on earth, so that was the torture test.
There are extra screws. We think kids will trade them like marbles. Analog input through microphone jack, no caps lock key, 640x480 still and video camera integration, dual mode touchpad, slanted desks, spill-proof keyboard.
They had to create some other components... servers, Wi-Fi repeaters, battery charges, etc. You don't want power going to desks, because you have to do it from the side, from the bottom, or from the top.
Their yield is over 99%.
The mesh network means that every laptop is also an access point.
5 companies in the world control 90% of LCD production. They have never taken an external design--until now. The migration from CRTs to LCDs is about all that the display industry has accomplished in the past 60 years. (Plasma was good for a moment, but it has the power consumption of two refrigerators.) This is because innovators can't get into the FABs. What the encoding people have known for a long time (luminance is more important than chrominance) is something display people have never done, until now.
Hitting a low-power design was a lot harder than meeting the price point.
All of the solutions to the world's most pressing problems must come via education.
The laptop has no mercury. The backlight strip is LED instead of CFL, and is replaceable. The ears have 3 functions... antenna, cover the USB ports, and lid latch.
They're using Python.
One of their core tenets is a commitment to open source.
OLPC might actually invert the technology pyramid: rather than new technology trickling down, the things they've innovated might wind up trickling up instead.
mlj@laptop.org
Half the children in the world live in India and China.
Maybe the OLPC will be an educational trojan horse. It's all open source--if the government tries to disable it, the kids will probably figure out how to turn it back on.
There'll be a presentation on the OLPC security model in July by ? (in Pittsburgh?) FIXME: look up this info.
The number one reason why people prefer to read paper than screens is due to resolution. But the resolution of the OLPC screen is higher than a 300dpi piece of paper.
The main constraint on the lifetime of the laptop is the flash memory, which has a finite number of writes cycles. It's very possible that future advances in NVRAM technology could boost the lifespan of the laptops.
The cost estimate for recycling is $0.10 per laptop. The most expensive part of recycling is simply transportation (not included in the $0.10 cost).
Mary Lou doesn't want to be a casuality in a gunfight between Intel and AMD. (Intel has a low-cost laptop, but it simply doesn't meet their requirements in terms of power consumption, et. al.)
You can go to the index of my Usenix notes.