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There's been discussion on this list on MIT's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project in the past. This talk may be of interest. -Tom -------- Original Message -------- Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 22:34:19 -0400 From: Peter Mager <p.mager at computer.org> There are 2 meetings scheduled for April in the joint seminar series cosponsored by the GBC/ACM and Boston/Central New England Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society. Both meetings are free and open to the public (as are all sessions in our joint evening seminar series): [...] Title: How We Built the OLPC (the $100 laptop for 3rd world children) Speaker: Jim Gettys, Vice President, Software Engineering, One Laptop Per Child (olpc) project MIT Room E51-315 Date: Thursday, 4/26/2007 Time: 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Abstract Software and hardware are very different. Software is malleable and has no cost to reproduce; hardware is a very different experience. Hardware systems design is like sausage making: o You can only make as much sausage as you can get *all* the ingredients for o Some parts of the recipe can be substituted, but not others o There are only a finite number of ingredients you can use in a recipe o If you know the right ingredient suppliers, you may be able to get custom ingredients made for you, so long as you are making a *lot* of sausage o Some of the major ingredients take years to grow, rather than a season. You can at best let the farmers (custom chip designers) know what kinds of ingredients you'd like the next time, and have to live with those commodity ingredients that are available in the quantity you need o It isn't a pretty process. o You don't know exactly how it is going to taste until you've cooked it. I will explore the sausage making that is the first One Laptop Per Child System, a novel, very low cost and low power laptop for kids education in the developing world, that runs Linux. The realities of life for many or most of the world's children present novel challenges to our hardware and software design, particularly due to lack of power, infrastructure, and available expertise in the field. Its recipe, while made out of standard or at most semi-custom ingredients, makes it a novel system: Our display has higher resolution than 95% of the laptop displays on the market today; approximately 1/7th the power consumption; 1/3rd the price; sunlight readability; and room-light readability with the backlight off, mesh networking, a novel dual mode touchpad that can function both as a standard touchpad and be used with a stylus, and novel power conservation capabilities. These include the ability to leave the screen and wireless mesh network fully on while the machine is suspended to RAM. These also presents challenges to our software: the power conservation techniques needed are very new. Conventional GUI's are intended for adult office workers: our audience are young children learning to read or getting a basic education, since most children only receive 5-6 years of education in many parts of the world. I'll touch on some of these aspects as well. These capabilities present novel challenges to Linux, and are possible for us to implement precisely because Linux is open source. The ability to design hardware knowing that the software can be modified as needed is liberating. Bio: Jim Gettys is interested in open-source systems for education on very inexpensive computers. He was previously at HP's Cambridge Research Lab working on the X Window System with Keith Packard, both on desktops and embedded systems such as the HP iPAQ. He helped to start the handhelds.org project and has also contributed to freedesktop.org efforts. Gettys has served on the X.org Foundation board of directors and served until 2004 on the Gnome Foundation board of directors. Gettys worked at W3C from 1995-1999; he is the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification (now an IETF Draft Standard). He is one of the principle authors of the X Window System, edited the HTTP/1.1 specification for the IETF, and and one of the authors of AF, a network transparent audio server system. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MIT is at 77 Massachusetts Avenue, just on the north side of Memorial Drive (on the north shore of the Charles River), in Cambridge, MA. Map showing the MIT campus. <http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?locate=bldg_e51> The red building is Bldg. E51; the T symbol at the top is the Kendall T-Station. Building E51 is located near the Eastern extremity of MIT, on Memorial Drive close to the Longfellow Bridge. It also adjoins Amherst Street and Wadsworth Street. Building E51 is a short walk from the Kendall T station. Room 315 is on the third floor. ______________________________________________ GBC-ACM mailing list GBC-ACM at mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/gbc-acm -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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