Pankaj Kedia is the Director of the MID program at Intel. The Mobile Internet Device is based on the new Intel Atom X86 processor, which should consume less power at similar X86 performance as previous Intel Ultra Low Voltage processors. The Atom systems might be able to dissipate low enough heat to be able to run without fan. Some of the MIDs will be using Linux OSes that permits to optimize the interfaces to the lowest possible system requirements. During this interview, Pankaj Kedia explains how the Atom processor works, when it will be available, how much it will cost, what makes the difference between the regular Atom and the Atom Centrino. No talk on camera though comparing Intel’s Atom to the AMD Geode or VIA C7M’s performance, price and power consumption.
The latest Classmate PC versions released by Intel for $550 do not seem to use the Atom processor yet. So the Atom processor might not be available in cheap laptops before later this year and perhaps not in the cheapest laptops before next year. The first Atom based products though as the MIDs are supposed to be released by the second half of this year already. But some of the MID devices like the Gigabyte M528 to use Atom processors are announced to cost $900, so not yet confirmed to provide a definite lower price then ULV based products.
An Interview I did with Asus Eee product manager Zing Chen. Comparing the OLPC XO to the Asus Eee, showing the Eee 900 running Linux and Windows XP and with its larger screen and lower battery life and the probable $499 to $599 price tag. So Asus is seemlingly going to route of increasing the number of features, increasing the price and lowering the battery life. But the Eee products manager clearly does not find the OLPC to be a competitor to the Asus Eee and she actually says that Asus appreciate the OLPC design.
Greenpeace is pointing their fingers at big IT industry manufacturers and distributors for not caring about the environment. They are also warning people that most so called old recycled computers are actually instead sent to some underdevelopped parts of asia and africa where slaves are melting motherboards and PC circuits with their bare hands to extract the little materials and metals they can that have any resale value on the black markets. So do not believe all those that want to export containers filled with your old computers to give to people in the third world. In some cases 75% of the old computers are unusable, they consume more power then there is available and thus the scheme is only using the charity as a means to escape and illegally monetize electronic waste. The USA doesn’t even have a policy to prevent electronic waste traffic. Hundreds of tons of electronic waste is shipped from the USA every year to be dumped and processed by slaves in the third world. Current PC components in most computers other then the OLPC have toxic chemicals in them that harm those poor people that melt them and that pollute the water and the ground where it is dumped.
Mr. Negroponte remains at the forefront of both the business and academic worlds and offers an invaluable chance to learn about business and social entrepreneurship in the digital age.
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Nicholas Negroponte shows the Harvard students the worlds first Windows XP based laptop. A deal with Microsoft is imminently going to be announced. Microsoft dedicated 25 engineers during the past year on developing a version of Windows XP to run smoothly on the XO laptop. “OLPC is an open-source Linux project, doing anything with Microsoft has got to be managed with a lot of delicacy” he says. “What we will do is not to take money from Microsoft, we are staying pure with our funding. What we are doing is to provide a dual-boot system like you are able to boot Windows or Linux on a Macintosh X86 based machine. By doing a dual-boot, you can then infiltrate other places, and by that I mean that people who buy these laptops for kids are adults and by definition they are people who use Windows and Office and that’s their view of the world. So if you give them a Windows machine that they can buy, and that the kids use Linux, that’s one way of getting further.”
“Last week, the city of Florence, Italy just decided to give every child in Florence an XO laptop and pay for an equal amount of laptops to be given to children in developping nations.”
“Windows XP is suprisingly well done and optimized. I’m on public record being pretty nasty about Microsoft and yet, when I saw that, they clearly put an enormous amount of effort and really did a very, very good job. That doesn’t mean we are switching to Microsoft.”
“We are working on a version now that will cost a hundred dollars or less and use about 85% [perhaps he said "less"] power then the XO-1 does. With the XO-1, if we close our eyes and did nothing, the price would drop 25-30% per year. There are 900 parts in the XO-1. For the next model, we can reduce the number of components to 50, that will also reduce the cost by another 40%. We have got to have discipline and not add features.”
It seems like it might have been developped in Chile. This is really awesome. They should develop voice synthesizer, voice recognition for the OLPC, and provide software that can synch an audio-book sound file with an ebook file and highlight the word while it is being spoken in the audio file. Eigther the voice-recognition should happen on a server and a timecode file could be loaded to provide the synchronization for each word of an audio-book or else it should be processed in realtime on the laptop. This voice synthesizer is a great way for children to get instant gratification for learning how to write, to type words and learn how to spell correctly. Imagine combining this functionality with a game where the computer asks a question and the student has to type in the answer which is then read by a voice synthesizer with all kinds of different voice pitches and voice types possible, the possibillities could be really endless. Then use this functionality in combination with the curriculum, and you have one of the many revolutionnary applications of the OLPC project right there.
Usos educativos del OLPC. Este video es parte de una serie de mini-videos donde mostramos las distintas aplicaciones educativas asociadas al proyecto ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD. Este video es un aporte de la campaña un computador por niño, Chile.
