Just got out of the first keynote, Ivan Krstic's talk on the "One Laptop Per Child" project. Pretty interesting -- here are some tidbits I remember:
- OLPC wants to change the way teaching and learning is done these days; they want to go back to the time when preschool kids interacted with each other by playing, and learned naturally peer-to-peer (as opposed to institutionalized teaching, which is one-to-many)
- contrary to popular opinion, the laptop does not have a hand crank (it would wear down too fast if it had one); however, the laptop can be powered by a pull string that reacts to the puller's strength and powers the device accordingly
- the 2 rabbit ears are used for wireless; the laptop can speak 802.11s, a new protocol that can be used for fully meshed networking; as soon as one laptop is connected to the internet, all the other ones in its mesh will be connected too
- the CPU is an AMD Geode at 366 MHz (not 400 or 500, actually 366)
- no hard drive, uses 512 MB of flash storage
- OS is a stripped-down version of Fedora
- runs Python wherever it can (including the init boot daemon); some exceptions are the X.org windowing system, the mDNS daemon, and the bus communication; pretty much all other user-level software, including the file system, is written in Python
- the laptop has a 'show source' button which obviously shows Python source code that can be edited, etc.
- no adult has ever been able to open the laptop in less than 2 minutes
- no child has ever needed more than 30 seconds to open the laptop
- two fortunate souls got an OLPC XO laptop today: Guido (as the creator of Python), and a guy who was able to recognize a very complicated formula that Ivan showed on a slide (the BBP formula for computing the n-th decimal place of pi); the guy needed approx. 1 minute to open the laptop; Guido's was already open, in a sign of respect I guess
- OLPC needs good Python developers; if you're interested, check out dev.laptop.org
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