Brian Vagnoni on 1 Mar 2008 00:11:36 -0800


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Re: [PLUG] OLPC Comments


I say wait another cpu/ram/display/video adapter generation otherwise you will pay a lot for performance/battery life, or not get good performance. MetaRAM looks very promising and it's suppose to be a 1/10 of the cost. So just imagine increasing your memory by an order of magnitude more than you have now for the same amount of money.

I saw the eeepc at Shmoo wasn't impressed though I admit I'm hard to impress. Celeron cpu, very small screen that won't quite do 800x600 which for some programs is a real problem. I would rather by a high-end Dell, or Sager, EuroComm or Alienware aka Dell these days and know that I have a real desktop under the hood.  I like that Dell 20' portable, not quite a laptop but it does look very cool.

I'd would also consider a Macbook too. I believe you get what you pay for, and most hardware vendors are working off of supermarket margins.

I stick with my xv6800 for handheld until something real comes along. The xv6800 has 256 mb and a 400mhz cpu plus MW6, with a 2gb MicroSD card it works out nice. Many more apps are available and they work ok. I was even able to stream music from my PowerMac G5  to my phone over the EDVO network.

Brian Vagnoni



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From: JP Vossen [mailto:jp@jpsdomain.org]
To: plug@lists.phillylinux.org
Sent: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:19:47 -0500
Subject: Re: [PLUG] OLPC Comments

> Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:00:30 -0500
> From: Casey Bralla <MailList@NerdWorld.org>
> Subject: [PLUG] OLPC Comments
>
> My dad bought a couple of the OLPC mini-laptops (You buy 2. You get 1, the other is
> donated). He messed around with it for a while, then sent it to me to try. I was
> not very impressed.
[...]
> All in all, a great disappointment.

Not to be too much of a grinch, but this is exactly why they didn't
really want to sell the units at all. I guess the payout from the G1G1
program was too much for them to resist.

OLPC is a very specific platform, designed expressly for a very specific
purpose. It is not a general purpose PC; it never was, and it never
will be. (Well, unless you nuke it back to the stone-age and install
Ubuntu or something on it, if that's even possible.)

If you want a small, general purpose Linux PC get an eeepc or one of the
clones that are starting to emerge.

Now, having said that, I fired it up in VMware a while ago and was
totally baffled by the interface too. We aren't the target audience,
and while you can argue that skilled learned on the OLPC aren't very
transferable, in the environment for which it was purpose-built, that
isn't going to matter much.

In the correct context, it's an amazing idea, design, and
implementation. Some of the security features are especially brilliant,
though many don't transfer to the generic PC design we're all familiar
with. (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost and
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=security;a=blob;f=bitfrost.txt, also
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/one_laptop_per.html)

My $0.02,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
Microsoft has single-handedly nullified Moore's Law.
Innate design flaws of Windows make a personal firewall, anti-virus
and anti-malware software mandatory. The resulting software arms race
has effectively flattened Moore's Law on hardware running Windows.
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