(2007-02-28) Blizzard Olpc

Saw Chris Blizzard speak about the OLPC last night. FlickR:OLPC. (a summary by someone else)

• Last year there were 40m Lap Top-s sold worldwide (and 1b Cell Phone-s). The OLPC goals is 1m in 2007, and 30-100m in 2008.

• targeting just 2W average draw, and think they'll get there.

  • Get 10:1 ratio in human-powering (stomp for 1hr, get 10hrs usage).

  • Can suspend CPU, and separate chip keeps refreshing screen (drawing less than 0.5W).

• pretty rugged

  • no moving parts

  • rubber Keyboard

  • internal bumpers, so can drop it

  • goal: run it through dishwasher

  • can field-replace LED light-source

  • total weight 5lbs (battery is big part)

• Mesh Network

  • Can keep Mesh Network running with CPU powered down, drawing less than 0.5W.

  • get 600m p2p (line of sight)

• Built-in Digital Camera.

• Sugar UI

  • all Python

  • easy to manipulate/customize

  • considered Squeak Smalltalk (which is also installed on the machine), but Python gaves lots of direct access to LinuxOS hooks, plus easier opportunity to re-write bits in C for performance, so it was much more productive.

  • XMPP Instant Messaging integrated into everything

  • apps are called "Activities"

  • all stuff (not quite clear on how much is explicit vs automatic) gets streamed to "Journal" (WebLog/LifeStreams).