(One Laptop Per Child -- news rundown)

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1228527977;fp;;fpid;;pf;1

Coming to a watering hole near you: OLPC's mesh networking

James Cameron on mesh networking, cow powered laptops and the OLPC

Andrew Hendry 04/03/2008 10:43:32

Even in today's high-tech world of unified communications and wireless mobility, the idea of two kids with laptops sitting under a tree somewhere in Saharan Africa being able to exchange information without any kind of infrastructure or configuration, seems as wild an idea as the land they live in.

But with the OLPC project, this scenario is rapidly becoming a widespread reality.

James Cameron works for a computer company in support for enterprise Linux customers, and is deeply immersed in electronics, radio and software engineering. For the past two years Cameron has devoted his diverse technical talents to testing the wireless network component of the One Laptop Per Child project.

Cameron got involved with the project because he lives and works in the outback, in a small village called Tooraweenah, 58km from Coonabarabran (approx 500km northwest of Sydney).

There are few wireless access points and little noise in the radio spectrum there, making it the perfect location for testing the OLPC XO laptops as it mirrors the third world environments they are being deployed in.

"One of our test scenarios is two kids under a tree, in the middle of nowhere, who want to transfer a file between one laptop and another. At the moment with the software that we have, the hardware, and the mesh automation, they can open their laptops, transfer whatever it is they want and then walk off. They don't need any IP address configuration or anything special. It just works," he said.

Mesh networking increases the range of an access point. It is a type of wireless networking that uses redundant and distributed nodes to increase the reliability and range of the network. It is used to route information between OLPC XOs by turning the laptop and the child carrying it into the network infrastructure.

"Instead of the client PCs going to a single central point, what happens with a mesh network is they find their way to a selected point by working through all the other nodes in the mesh," Cameron said.

The mesh network is self-healing and autonomous, and meets the goals of the OLPC project by working without the need to hire electricians and radio specialists to make it work.

"The kids don't have to live within sight of the school to be able to use the school's repository of information, like its online library; they only have to be within radio sight of another kid who is within radio sight.

"They [schools] don't need to put in the infrastructure to cover the whole village - the kids carry it with them as they go home. It means you can deploy to more schools because you don't have to pay for the extra infrastructure," Cameron said.

Testing in the outback, Cameron discovered that the range of the XO could go up to 1.6km "quite easily" at 1.5m above ground.

But in the vast Australian outback, the Sahara or any other great rural expanse, 1.6km is still a very short distance.

"Imagine the kids are down at the waterhole after school, they will take their laptops there of course because they are on their way home, but they cant get to the school server without sending some of the kids back along the path to act as mesh nodes to get there. But if we've got a tall tree nearby, the school can organize to put a mesh node on top of that powered by a solar panel."

Cameron estimates a cost of about US$35 for a mesh node, a battery and a solar panel that can turn any tall tree, windmill, roof or rocky outcrop into a stand alone mesh node, ensuring coverage for the kids at an affordable cost.

"Assuming a range of 1.6km holds true, (the mathematical formula for area of a circle) Pi R squared tells us one well placed mesh node will cover up to eight square kilometres."

Cheap, conservable energy is also a big issue for the OLPC project, as many of the children who will use them wont have a way to charge their laptop at home, and will rely on their school to charge it for them.

"The school might have a generator or a solar panel, or in one school where we've got laptops deployed now we have two cows who walk around pushing a lever which rotates a generator that powers fifteen laptops for charging, so you get energy from wherever it's available," Cameron said.

The OLPC can also be powered by a hand crank, and can maintain an active wireless connection when it is hibernating.

Cameron isn't paid for his research and development work, but gets his rewards from being able to "play with some cool gear," and by knowing that his efforts are aiding an education revolution.

"I want to make a difference. I can't make a difference by creating some new fantastic computer for a company because all they will do is sell it. But on this we can change the way kids learn, we can improve education over the entire planet."

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.dailytech.com/XO+Notebook+Faces+Challenges+in+Very+Poor+Peruvian +Villages/article11605.htm

XO Notebook Faces Challenges in Very Poor Peruvian Villages

Shane McGlaun (Blog) - April 25, 2008 1:16 PM

Peruvian educators hope to inspire children to be more than farmers with the XO Notebook

A lot has been said here at DailyTech about the XO Laptop and the lofty goals of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC). The original goal was for the OLPC’s XO notebook to sell for $100 per unit, which never materialized with finished machined costing nearly double that amount.

Despite the cost issues the XO notebook has had some sales with Peru ordering 260,000 of the notebooks for use in its schools across the country. Peru faces some significant obstacles in the roll out and use of the XO notebook including teachers who lack what would be considered a quality education in most countries to towns and schools without electricity.

According to Technology Review, Peru is committed to the program and may even order more XO Notebooks if the program works well. What we consider poor here in America is often far from what other countries consider poor and this is very much the case in rural Peru where homes have no electricity and often no running water.

Part of the program of providing the XO notebooks to towns and villages in Peru involves providing solar power or generators to charge the notebooks. Most of the places the XO will see duty in Peru don’t have Internet access. One of the main components of the XO for its use in education is digital copies of books. Many students in the very poor Peruvian communities have never owned a book.

To keep digital content up to date on the XO notebooks teachers download updates for the Education Ministry office one per month when the pick up their paycheck according to Technology Review. The initial Peruvian test project was conducted in a small town with a previous Internet connection via satellite called Arahuay, described by Education ministry officials as “not poor enough” to actually receive XO Notebooks in the full program rollout.

Children in the town say they use their XO notebooks to send email, play games, take pictures, draw and perform calculations. The town internet connection is slow with web queries described as taking several minutes to execute.

A father of one of the children in the town said about is son using the XO Notebook, “He knows how to use the computer--he knows how to use every part of it [the XO notebook]. Above all, it is more knowledge for him."

Peruvian educators say what they hope to give children in Peru from the XO Notebook is hope and the opportunity to do something else with their lives other than to become farmers if they desire.

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15686

OLPC: ‘I often treat it like a book’

p2pnet news | P2P:- Last November I participated in the Give One, Get One program of the One Laptop Per Child project. I received my “get one” XO in late January, at the beginning of the shipments to Canada. After a few months of having it I wanted to offer my thoughts.

I could give you specs on the hardware, but those interested in that can find the details online as well as comparisons with other smaller laptops such as the ASUS eee PC. I didn’t get my XO because of the hardware specs, and to be honest I didn’t think I would use it much. I mostly wanted to donate to the project and have a prop to show politicians and policy makers when I was hand-waiving about Free Software.

While that was my plan, it turns out that I carry it with me everywhere. It is quite rugged, so I feel comfortable just dropping it into my knapsack. The software is designed to be minimalistic in that it doesn’t run with one of the heavy desktops that Linux normally runs with (GNOME or KDE) or that Windows or Mac has. This means that the battery will last much longer than other laptops, which is quite important. It has that dual-mode screen that makes it easy to read in the sunlight, with this mode also reducing power consumption (IE: increasing battery life).

I often treat it like a book, opening a PDF or text file and walking around with it flipped into the e-book mode. It may be heavier than most books, but then again I don’t print as much paper as I did previously either. It doesn’t feel like I’m reading from a computer screen, and feels much closer to the comfort of reading a book.

I find I can do almost all my work as long as I can get to a computer with a browser and a shell that I can use to SSH into my servers, which I can and have done with the XO. The snow has finally melted in Ottawa, and I’ve already sat just outside the Parliament Pub (Which has an OGWifi Hotspot) reading and responding to my email, and participating on BLOGs).

The XO isn’t designed to be a replacement of a destkop computer for an adult, but in my specific case it works pretty well.

The hardest thing for people to realize about the OLPC project is that it isn’t a hardware project. The use of the domain “laptop.org” for their site is in fact unfortunate.

This educational project had specific hardware needs, and unfortunately the market was not yet supplying these needs. A hardware team was formed to design and get built the XO laptop, as well as some other supporting hardware such as the Active Antenna. The team was intended to create the hardware, and then leave the project to commercialize the hardware so that the project may benefit from the offshoots. It’s interesting how it was misreported by the media which suggested members of the hardware team leaving the project was a failure, rather than an anticipated measure of success.

The OLPC project will be far more successful if it no longer needs to create hardware at all.

The focus shouldn’t be on the laptop but the “One Per Child” aspect of their educational philosophy which is intended to lead to constructionist learning. The idea is that learning doesn’t just happen in special classrooms where you have a teacher in front, but that learning happens everywhere. Having a classroom of computers may be better than nothing, but having each child have their own provides for learning opportunities that can’t happen in any other way. The idea isn’t to learn about “computers”, but to have the computer be a tool used to explore other things (art, the natural world, etc).

The software for the project is important. The idea is that as much as can be made easily modifiable by the youth should be able to be. This isn’t to say every child will modify software, but the opportunity exists for those who want to just as the opportunity to better learn how to manipulate other tools exists for children.

When you launch an activity on the XO it creates a little virtual environment where any changes are stored. If the child likes the changes, they can be saved, and if the changes turned out to be boring, they can just be deleted. This is a far more useful environment than what’s traditionally done with computing where things are divided by applications that can manipulate files, given any changes to an application are then global to the entire computer rather than just to a specific instance. While global changes are better for production development, keeping the changes local is far better for learning.

It should be obvious software used to enable constructionist learning needs to be legally modifiable, and that those modifications need to be able to be shared with other children. This means that non-Free Software would not work well with these educational goals. This leads us directly into discussing some of the competition.

Microsoft and Intel have a Classmate PC which they consider to be a competitor to the XO laptop and the OLPC educational project. While there are versions of this PC that are shipped with Linux rather than Microsoft’s OS, the educational philosophy is quite different.

Their idea is to ship generic PCs that would enable children to learn the same tools that the rich countries are already using, thus allowing them to be trained to work in that environment.

There are many flaws with this goal, not the least of which is that the majority of the worlds population can’t afford to pay the royalties expected by legacy software vendors.

The vast majority of the world’s population are either going to not use royalty-based software, or they’re going to using infringing versions, given it’s simply unreasonable for them to spend large percentages of their income on unnecessary royalties. While representatives of Microsoft have clarified in the past that they’d prefer people use counterfeit windows than use competing software, this is bad public policy as it increases disrespect for authors rights. Promoting royalty-based software in these countries only promotes so-called “software piracy”.

I also disagree with the whole concept of education as job training, rather than education being about enabling us to learn how to learn and become productive members of society. I consider it especially bad public policy for learning around technology given that the sector changes very quickly, and what people learn as part of “job training” becomes obsolete very quickly. It would be hard to convince me that any of the software tools that are popular today will be around in 10 years, just as it doesn’t surprise me that the software I learned with 20+ years ago is no longer what people are learning today.

There’s something about the OLPC environment that reminds me of when I was learning computing.

Back in the mid 1980’s many of the computers you would buy would have manuals that had schematics in the back. You could go out and buy magazines that would include source code (often in the computing language known as “Basic”) that you could type in, run, modify, and then share the modifications with your friends.

My interest in computing was started because of my ability to take apart and modify both the hardware and software that I had in front of me, and explore in ways that were not necessarily conceived of by the designers.

The XO doesn’t come with schematics, although the Measure activity includes a hardware project people are intended to build themselves. The software environment lends itself to the same type of learning I grew up in. In the rich countries, it’s still possible for motivated youth to install Linux on their own computers and learn in that environment, although the public policy direction (through things like legal protection for “DRM”) is to make these types of choices harder and possibly illegal. More and more of the computing in the hands of youth have “no user modifiable parts inside”.

One thought that always comes to my mind is that if the OLPC educational project is successful in majority world countries, but unsuccessful here in the currently rich countries, we’re heading into a future where those who grew up being able to be creative and innovative will be elsewhere.

Will this eventually lead to a flipping of which will be the rich and which will be the poor countries?

Russell McOrmond - p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He’s also the CLUE policy coordinator.]

[ckaihatsu]

http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com/2008/02/richard-stallman-on-olpc-laptop.html


Richard Stallman on the OLPC Laptop


Tuesday, February 05, 2008

[Richard Stallman] Richard M Stallman (popularly known as rms), the founder of the GNU project and President of Free Software Foundation was in Southern India this January. On his regular advocacy tour, he gave talks in different locations where people thronged to get a glimpse of him and hear what he had to say about issues relating to free software.

We caught up with him for an hour long interview while he was in the city of Hyderabad. RMS heaped praises for the One Laptop Per Child Project. He is even contemplating making a switch to XO, the flagship machine of the project, from his "old thinkpad". Stallman went on to say that the OLPC laptop has given people a way to use the free BIOS. Lack of a widely available free BIOS has remained a major issue in the free software community. Stallman has always stressed for the need to use free softwares in educational institutes. The OLPC project has only made him happier.

He is, however dissatisfied with the wireless networking system used in the XO. Since it uses a proprietary technology, he plans to remove it and use a separate device when he needs to make wireless communication with others.

You can download this one-minute audio clip (ogg-vorbis) of our interview with him where he talks about the OLPC laptop.

Posted by Bibek Paudel. at 2:31 PM

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2008/04/first_impressions_classmate_2.html

First impressions: Classmate 2

* Darren Waters
* 17 Apr 08, 15:19 GMT

I'm writing this post on one of Intel's new generation of laptops designed for the developing world - the Classmate PC - and it's quite a task, mainly because my fat fingers are too large for the keyboard.

This is the machine that arguably ended Intel's relationship with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), makers of the XO laptop. According to Intel, OLPC wanted the firm to stop making the Classmate. Intel refused and pulled out of their deal.

Whatever the truth - the Classmate is definitely a rival to the XO's ambitions in the developing world generally and in education in particular

I've been playing with the Classmate for a few days and my first impression is that the two laptops herald from polar opposite philosophies about how to end the digital divide.

We've written lots about the XO and the first Classmate, so I won't repeat myself.

Certainly, the Classmate 2 is exactly the sort of machine you would expect a commercially driven firm to make for the developing world.

It's a cut-price, cut-down laptop that runs XP moderately well, and connects to the net without a hitch. In fact, it accomplishes most tasks thrown at it without a hitch and its underpowered processor only really struggles when it is attempting to multi-task.

It has been designed with education and the developing world in mind, says Intel, and yes, there are a small number of unique features. It has mesh networking - so that laptops can piggyback their wireless and create ad hoc networks.

But this feels like a feature pilfered from the XO and added only because it was such a glaring oversight in the first machine.

When you first connect to a wireless network it searches for other teachers' laptops on the network. It also comes with a nifty handle velcro-ed on to the machine for carrying and has a "water resistant" keyboard.

But that's about it, to be honest. It's small, well-made, quite rugged, with a decent keyboard and decent screen, albeit in only 800x400 resolution.

The key difference between the Classmate and XO is the different approach to software and operating system.

The XO comes with a variation of Linux installed - a user interface designed specifically for education, and applications built to support the educational environment.

The Classmate machine I'm using comes with XP loaded as standard - but there are options to have Linux.

And while there are plans afoot to port XP to the XO machine, it remains by and large a Linux machine.

There is educational software pre-loaded onto the Classmate machine and a teacher can monitor the work of children from a host machine.

The use of Windows gives the Classmate a recognition and sense of security to governments and educators looking to buy laptops for schools.

After all, Windows is the world's most dominant operating system.

So what else has changed with the second generation Classmate laptop?

Not much: the second gen laptop now has two models (7 inch and 9 inch screen) and has a built-in webcam.

It's clear the re-design of the Classmate is more about making the machine more design friendly to consumers and educators in the developed world than improving the internals of the machine.

Last year nine-year-old Rufus Cellan-Jones gave his impressions of the XO laptop. We've given him a 7-inch model and expect his comments some time next week.

The machines go on sale for between $300 and $500, which is a lot more expensive than an XO, more expensive than an Asus EEE PC and probably a lot more than many educators can afford to pay.

Nicholas Negroponte's dream of one laptop per child - whether an XO or a Classmate, is still some way off.

PS: The BBC has now upgraded its blogging software so that, amongst other things, it better withstands the volume of comments we get. From today if you want to comment on any BBC blog you will need to register first. You can read more about this on the Editors' blog.

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.manilastandardtoday.com/?page=news3_mar31_2008

Local firm rolls out P17K laptop

LOCAL computer maker Neo Manufacturing and Services Inc. and global chip manufacturer Intel jointly launched over the weekend a new mini-laptop that will cost P16,999.

Neo spokesman Mariel Que said the computer, locally called Neo eXplore X1, is a renamed version of Intel’s Classmate PC, a “ruggedized and shock-proof” laptop with a keyboard that will not be damaged by liquid spillages.

Intel Philippines country manager Ricardo Banaag said the eXplore is primarily designed for primary school children, but may also be used by first-time PC users for word-processing and Internet access.

It comes with a 900Mhz Intel Celeron M processor, 7-inch display screen, 512MB to 1GB memory, 30GB of hard disk storage, and is Internet-ready. It weighs 0.66 kilograms (1.45 pounds) and is the size of a schoolchild’s lunchbox, but will have the memory capacity and the usual features of a standard basic laptop.

Intel’s Classmate PC was born out of the vision of improving the quality of education and teaching methods in local public schools by providing them computers, an idea pioneered by the US-based OLPC Foundation, which espoused “One Laptop Per Child” at a cost of $100.

Intel had earlier supported OLPC Foundation’s advocacy and even committed $6 million to push the campaign forward, but the partnership collapsed after Intel abandoned the project.

Since then, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte has accused Intel of using underhand tactics to block OLPC sales and to win over OLPC customers to the Classmate PC.

Negroponte claims Intel has been selling laptops with their brand on it directly to the very same people OLPC had been talking to, a claim that Intel denied.

The local launching of the Neo eXplore followed its appearance on computer shop shelves in India, but Intel’s emerging markets manager Lila Ibrahim said the Classmate PC would also be available in store shelves in the US and Europe.

Taiwan’s Asus also made a buzz late last year after they released the equally affordable Asus Eee PC, which used open source software installed on a flash drive.

Asus brought down the cost of its Asus Eee PC to P17,000 when it was launched in the fourth quarter last year, and was among the most wanted electronic devices in the market during the Christmas season. AFP