Memex 1.1

Jim Gettys, VP of Software for the One Laptop Per Child project was in Cambridge today and gave an impromptu seminar at the Computer Lab. It was a fascinating insight into the amount of hard work and ingenuity that has gone into the design of this elegant little gizmo:

Jim had three of the laptops in his bag and left them out for us to examine.

I took notes as he talked and may blog a full account later. But, looking back, the headlines are:

Wireless networking is central to the project, and it does mesh networking in a really neat way. My Airport card picked up the mesh immediately, and it was interesting to see the neat way the OLPC interface represents other wireless nets.

They’ve done a lot of hard thinking about power consumption and have come up with some very neat tricks for paring down consumption. The CPU is off much of the time, for example.

The display (a custom-built 7.5″ 200 dpi TFT ultra-low power consumption screen) is readable in bright sunlight. Jim had a nice slide of the laptop alongside a traditional HP laptop in blazing sunshine. Guess which screen is an unreadable black?

The laptop has a built-in camera — rather like the iSight built in to Intel Macs. Kids love this, apparently.

There are plans to sell OEM versions of the laptop in developed countries — but for considerably more than $100.

Conventional file systems are pretty baffling to a young kid who doesn’t know how to read yet. So the OLPC has, as its central idea, the concept of a time-ordered journal. (This also helps with decisions about what to throw away: you’re less tempted to keep old stuff).

The OLPC Chat protocol is “loosely based” on Jabber.

Open source software is a key and integral part of the project.

Making the machines look very much like a kids’ toy is part of the anti-theft strategy. (Any adult with one who isn’t a teacher will be suspect.) Also it helps that it doesn’t run Windows (makes it less desirable to thieves).

The project is running into ‘political’ difficulties in certain targeted countries. These difficulties are partly caused by certain Western companies — but, interestingly, not Microsoft. Now I wonder which large chip manufacturer might be involved?

After Jim had finished, he was mobbed by a few people. The students went straight for the laptops, though!

All in all, it was a terrific event. Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for organising it.

Postscript: The “bunny ears” on the laptop are in fact WiFi antennae!

Ed Felten got his hands on one of the laptops, and then had the great idea of giving it to a 12-year-old friend of his to review. (After all, the machine is designed for kids.) He then published the resulting review on his Blog. It’s a good read. This is how it concludes:

All in all, this laptop is great for its price, its job, and its value. It is almost perfect. Just speed it up, give it a little more battery charge hold, and you have yourself the perfect laptop. I’m sure kids around the world will really love, enjoy, and cherish these laptops. They will be so useful. This program is truly amazing.

Hooray! Nice piece by Andrew Brown in today’s Guardian Technology supplement. Note engaging picture of Quentin in triplicate. Must clip it out and send it to his parents. The boy done good!

This morning’s Observer column…

First, the numbers. China has 137 million users (compared with about 190 million in the US), but the online population is increasing at such a rate that in about two years there will be more Chinese than Americans on the net.

Within China, however, there’s a deep digital divide: Chinese users are overwhelmingly urban, young and male. A third are students, while a further third are business users. The deepest divide is the urban vs rural one; internet penetration among city dwellers is 20 per cent, compared with only 3 per cent for rural districts. (The comparable US figures are 70 per cent and 61 per cent respectively.)

Given that China’s rulers see the net as a critical enabler of development, a key policy issue for the regime is how to bridge the urban/rural gap. Fallows cites research suggesting that the two big obstacles are lack of connectivity and a huge skills deficiency…

Wow! Not sure I really believe this…

Chip-maker Intel has joined forces with the makers of the $100 laptop.

The agreement marks a huge turnaround for both the not-for-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation and Intel.

In May this year, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, said the silicon giant “should be ashamed of itself” for efforts to undermine his initiative.

He accused Intel of selling its own cut-price laptop - the Classmate PC - below cost to drive him out of markets in the developing world…

My hunch is that the negative PR that resulted from Craig Barrett’s aggression proved too much for the Intel Board. Wonder who brokered the peace deal?

What, one wonders, have the unfortunate Indians done to deserve this?

Interesting interview from Der Spiegel with a Kenyan economist, James Shikwati, who argues that aid to Africa does more harm than good.

Cute, isn’t it? Wonder if Bill Gates put them up to it. (He’s been very rude about the One Laptop Per Child project in the past.) Anyway, Intel claims to be shipping this gizmo to the developing world. According to the blurb:

Classmate PCs are rugged and include features that are commonly found in today’s mainstream PCs (such as storage and built-in wireless), and are capable of running mainstream applications including video and educational software. These PCs are equipped with unique functions such as a water-resistant keyboard, an integrated educational feature set that allows teacher-student and teacher-parent collaboration, and an advanced theft-control feature using a network-issued digital certification. Intel works in each market with local software, hardware and communications companies that manufacture, distribute, service and support these Intel-powered classmate PCs.

Translation: these devices run Windows and are designed to (a) wean poor people onto Microsoft software and (b) make piracy difficult.

Over at OLPC, Nick Negroponte is not amused.

There are various differences in both the hardware and software, but Professor Negroponte believes the main problem is that his machine uses a processor designed by Intel’s main competitor, AMD.

“Intel and AMD fight viciously,” he told CBS. “We’re just sort of caught in the middle.”

Professor Negroponte says Intel has distributed marketing literature to governments with titles such as “the shortcomings of the One Laptop per Child approach”, which outline the supposedly stronger points of the Classmate.

Mr Barrett [Intel's CEO, Craig Barrett] told CBS: “Someone at Intel was comparing the Classmate PC with another device being offered in the marketplace. That’s the way our business works.”

He dismissed claims that Intel was trying to put OLPC out of business as “crazy”.

“There are lots of opportunities for us to work together,” he said.

According to the BBC report, “Intel says it already has orders for ‘thousands’ of Classmates, which currently cost over $200 (£100).”

Foreign Policy has published a sobering photo-essay on what happens to our digital junk after it’s been dumped on the developing world.

Thanks to Nick Carr for the pointer.

Michael Dales picked up on the Meebo IM map that I blogged and created a nice stop-frame video from the Meebo maps. Strange to see how some parts of the world never light up. The digital divide in lights, as it were. Michael’s added some thoughtful comments of his own.