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=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=
1. Mechanical system: Mark Foster and the hardware team have been working hard responding to field feedback on the B1 machines. It is always very satisfying to ship out the first build machines, but now comes the serious work of transforming the OLPC machine into a production-worthy system. This enhancement process will impact all areas of the system. The mechanical engineering team, for instance, is now focused primarily on increasing robustness and longevity, fit and finish, and on improving production efficiency. Special thanks to Bret Recor for his incredible efforts this week assisting the mechanical team—his contributions were both impressive and sincerely appreciated!
1. The Argentine foreign ministry organized a seminar for government and
business leaders focused on enhancing the high-technology sector in the
country. David Cavallo was invited to speak to present OLPC as a critical
element for improving education, social equity, and helping to create a
larger core of technological fluency among the population.


2. Electrical system: The electrical team is particularly focused on signal integrity. Thanks are due here to AMD, for their advice and suggestions, which will definitely improve the robustness of the system. In addition, some power-system issues have been reported in the field, so the system's front-end has been significantly improved to handle the wide variety of operating environments that we are encountering. Fortunately, some of these issues are controllable by the built-in firmware in the system's embedded controller and so may easily be updated in the field. Special thanks to Mitch Bradley for creating a super easy-to-use update tool that will make it easy to rapidly update our systems in the field with the new code!
2. A video featuring Nicholas, Seymour Papert, and Walter talking about the
educational mission of the laptop is now on the TechnologyReview web site
3. Software: Work continues on the wireless driver. Marcelo Tosatti has apparently tracked down the scan hang we were seeing. We'll see a fix for that in our builds at some point. We are getting pretty close to an upstream merged
(See http://www.techreview.com/video/).
of that code.


4. Dan Williams, Marco Gritti, and Robert McQueen have been discussing changes to the underlying protocol we have been using on the local mesh network to communicate between the laptops. This is required to set us up to be able to scale up to server-mitigated networks using Jabber, the underlying protocol used in many chat networks, including Google Talk.
3. This week we focused on improving the anti-glare properties of the
display. This is mainly a property of the surface treatment of the
polarizer; we are making that surface more diffuse in both reflection and
transmission.


5. Robert also did some testing using the gstreamer framework and reports that video conferencing looks entirely doable on the laptop. He says that video streaming works smoothly with FFmpeg's H263 codec at QCIF resolution (about 176×120) at 15 frames per second, taking up about 40–50% of the CPU to encode and about 10–15% to decode. Increasing the resolution takes the CPU usage up considerable, but it might be possible to do QVGA (320×240). More testing and performance work is desirable. Audio streaming works fine with PCMU (one audio encoding) but he wasn't able to test Speex (another audio coding) because it appeared to be broken. We'll have to do some more testing.
4. Mary Lou keynoted the Asian Digital Libraries Conference in Kyoto this
week. As usual there was tremendous interest in the laptop and a strong
desire on the part of the libraries to contribute. The attendees expressed
a need for a bug-tracker-like interface (See http://dev.laptop.org) for
contributions from their side; evidence that the content community is
beginning to think like the open-source community.


6. User interface: Dan, Marco, Ivan Krstić, and Eben Eliason held a day-long charrette at Pentagram. The primary focus was on the journal design and a set of first features to implement has been selected. Also moving along has been activity-bundle implementation and the beginnings of how the clipboard will work.
5. Software progress is noticeably faster now we have machines; we've spun
10 new build images in the past two weeks. Jim Gettys and the entire
software team worked on an extensive set of release notes, which everyone
receiving machines should read carefully (See [[BTest-1 Release Notes]]).


7. Performance: As Nicholas has repeatedly pointed out, for the last 15 years, software has become larger and often much slower. Ian Piumarta (and others working with Alan Kay) has been working on an extensible, dynamic, object-oriented language system that holds the promise of radical performance improvement on languages such as Python and Javascript, now heavily used by OLPC. This work seeks to both radically simplify building such languages and achieve much higher performance. Building an implementation of Javascript or Smalltalk in this system can be as little as a few thousand lines of code; a simple Javascript implementation can be done in just over 400 lines of code, yet be faster than the carefully crafted conventional interpreter orders of magnitude larger. It is entirely possible the technology Ian has developed will not only be used for languages of key interest to OLPC, but even long before then, it may result in greatly increasing the performance of graphics on the OLPC and the Linux desktop in general.
6. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, and Chris Ball worked on making it simpler
to update machines to current firmware and software. With the completion of
the BTest-1 build and shipment of the machines, we need to have an easy way
to update all machines in the field—not only to enable keeping them up to
date, but to fix key bugs that were not fixed by the time we had to commit
to manufacturing. We now have a three-step update procedure that we believe
anyone should easily be able to perform using a small USB key. (This new
procedure will become available on Monday after final testing.) All the
developer systems in Cambridge will be updated and sent out quickly this
coming week, now that this is working (See: [[Autoreinstallation image]]).


8. Chris Ball started serious exploration of Python performance on OLPC, and established a baseline of the Cairo graphics library performance on our hardware, and confirmed the great performance improvements seen elsewhere in Cairo. By linking Python differently, it appears a 40% improvement of performance is easy to achieve. Chris also worked with Mitch on completion of an extremely simple system update procedure. We can now update the software entirely on an OLPC system in about 3 minutes elapsed time and 20 seconds of human time.
7. Mitch released new firmware with look and feel improvements, wired-
networking support, manufacturing-data support, and a few bug fixes. The
firmware is now built from the public source tree; Mitch has started
working on scheme for storing keymaps in ROM.


9. Mitch and Richard Smith will shortly release a new version of the BIOS, containing fixes for some of the battery-charging problems that have been reported.
8. Chis Ball started on performance work this week; first up will be
understanding the long activity-startup time, followed by establishing a
benchmark for Cairo and X- Window System performance, so we can keep track
of improvements. Performance will become an increasing focus of Chris'
time.

9. Lilian Walter has a version of memtest86 running using the open firmware
(OFW) memory property (instead of probing memory) and display driver. It is
by no means complete. It is a good proof of concept that existing
diagnostics can still run without EGA, UART, and BIOS, and with OFW at the
helm.


Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].

Revision as of 14:53, 9 December 2006

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

1. Mechanical system: Mark Foster and the hardware team have been working hard responding to field feedback on the B1 machines. It is always very satisfying to ship out the first build machines, but now comes the serious work of transforming the OLPC machine into a production-worthy system. This enhancement process will impact all areas of the system. The mechanical engineering team, for instance, is now focused primarily on increasing robustness and longevity, fit and finish, and on improving production efficiency. Special thanks to Bret Recor for his incredible efforts this week assisting the mechanical team—his contributions were both impressive and sincerely appreciated!

2. Electrical system: The electrical team is particularly focused on signal integrity. Thanks are due here to AMD, for their advice and suggestions, which will definitely improve the robustness of the system. In addition, some power-system issues have been reported in the field, so the system's front-end has been significantly improved to handle the wide variety of operating environments that we are encountering. Fortunately, some of these issues are controllable by the built-in firmware in the system's embedded controller and so may easily be updated in the field. Special thanks to Mitch Bradley for creating a super easy-to-use update tool that will make it easy to rapidly update our systems in the field with the new code!

3. Software: Work continues on the wireless driver. Marcelo Tosatti has apparently tracked down the scan hang we were seeing. We'll see a fix for that in our builds at some point. We are getting pretty close to an upstream merged of that code.

4. Dan Williams, Marco Gritti, and Robert McQueen have been discussing changes to the underlying protocol we have been using on the local mesh network to communicate between the laptops. This is required to set us up to be able to scale up to server-mitigated networks using Jabber, the underlying protocol used in many chat networks, including Google Talk.

5. Robert also did some testing using the gstreamer framework and reports that video conferencing looks entirely doable on the laptop. He says that video streaming works smoothly with FFmpeg's H263 codec at QCIF resolution (about 176×120) at 15 frames per second, taking up about 40–50% of the CPU to encode and about 10–15% to decode. Increasing the resolution takes the CPU usage up considerable, but it might be possible to do QVGA (320×240). More testing and performance work is desirable. Audio streaming works fine with PCMU (one audio encoding) but he wasn't able to test Speex (another audio coding) because it appeared to be broken. We'll have to do some more testing.

6. User interface: Dan, Marco, Ivan Krstić, and Eben Eliason held a day-long charrette at Pentagram. The primary focus was on the journal design and a set of first features to implement has been selected. Also moving along has been activity-bundle implementation and the beginnings of how the clipboard will work.

7. Performance: As Nicholas has repeatedly pointed out, for the last 15 years, software has become larger and often much slower. Ian Piumarta (and others working with Alan Kay) has been working on an extensible, dynamic, object-oriented language system that holds the promise of radical performance improvement on languages such as Python and Javascript, now heavily used by OLPC. This work seeks to both radically simplify building such languages and achieve much higher performance. Building an implementation of Javascript or Smalltalk in this system can be as little as a few thousand lines of code; a simple Javascript implementation can be done in just over 400 lines of code, yet be faster than the carefully crafted conventional interpreter orders of magnitude larger. It is entirely possible the technology Ian has developed will not only be used for languages of key interest to OLPC, but even long before then, it may result in greatly increasing the performance of graphics on the OLPC and the Linux desktop in general.

8. Chris Ball started serious exploration of Python performance on OLPC, and established a baseline of the Cairo graphics library performance on our hardware, and confirmed the great performance improvements seen elsewhere in Cairo. By linking Python differently, it appears a 40% improvement of performance is easy to achieve. Chris also worked with Mitch on completion of an extremely simple system update procedure. We can now update the software entirely on an OLPC system in about 3 minutes elapsed time and 20 seconds of human time.

9. Mitch and Richard Smith will shortly release a new version of the BIOS, containing fixes for some of the battery-charging problems that have been reported.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org

MILESTONES

Nov. 2006 First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education.
Oct. 2006 B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child
Sep. 2006 UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC
Aug. 2006 Working prototype of the dual-mode display
Jun. 2006 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network
First video with working prototype [1]
May 2006 eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced
Apr. 2006 Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems
Mar. 2006 Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers
Feb. 2006 Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware
Jan. 2006 World Economic Forum, Switzerland
UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement
news release
Dec. 2005 Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop
(html)(pdf)
Nov. 2005 WSIS, Tunisia
Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC

Photos: (Image 1) (Image 2) (Image 3)
Webcast: (Arabic) (English) (French) (original)
Webcast provided by the ITU and UN Webcast Services with the support of RealNetworks Ltd. RealPlayer is required to view the webcast (available at no cost).

Aug. 2005 Design Continuum starts design of first laptop
Jul. 2005 Formal signing of original members of OLPC
Mar. 2005 Brightstar and Red Hat come on board
Jan. 2005 Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC

PRESS

21 Nov. 2006 Official Release|First 1,000 XO-Laptops Roll off the Assembly Line in Shanghai
19 Nov. 2006 Jamaica Gleaner|Technology - a tool for transformation
19 Nov. 2006 International Herald Tribune|One Laptop per Child: Computer designed for those who can least afford them
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review|Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part III
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review|Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part II
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review|Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part I
8 Nov. 2006 Popular Science| Best of What's New 2006: One Laptop per Child XO- Better Screen, Better World
6 Nov. 2006 ZDNet.co.uk | Why Every Child Deserves a Laptop- Matthew Szulik, CEO, Red Hat
27 Oct. 2006 LinuxWorld | Children's Laptop Inspires Open Source Projects
24 Oct. 2006 LA Times | Upward Mobility in a Laptop
24 Oct. 2006 Fortune | This PC wants to save the world
12 Oct. 2006 Bostonist | One Laptop per Child for Libya
11 Oct. 2006 New York Times | U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren
3 Oct. 2006 GulfNews.com | College gets look at $100 Children's Laptop Computer
25 Sep. 2006 vnunet.com | OLPC offered free satellite connections
14 Sep. 2006 Vanguard | Keyboard In Three Nigerian Languages Ready-Obasanjo
08 Sep. 2006 Technology Review | Hack: The Hundred Dollar Laptop
06 Sep. 2006 nacion.com | Computadoras de $100 estarán listas en el 2007
 Aug. 2006 Wired | The Laptop Crusade
28 Aug. 2006 PCINpact.com | L'OLPC a 100 $ est finalise: un engin hors du commun
21 Aug. 2006 EWeek.com | Knocking Down Barriers to the $100 Laptop
31 Jul. 2006 NPR | Affordable Laptop Computer Project Moves Forward
07 Jul. 2006 San Diego Union-Tribune | U.S. and international educators show great interest in prototype
Jul. 2006 SPIE Professional | $100 laptop nears launch
21 Jun. 2006 BusinessWeek online | For Brazil's Poor, a Digital Deliverance?
24 May 2006 CNET News.com | $100 laptop gets working prototype
07 Apr. 2006 rediff.com | Our $100 laptops will run on human power
02 Apr. 2006 O Estado de S.Paulo | Fazer a diferença
28 Mar. 2006 FT.com | Waking up to a laptop revolution
24 Mar. 2006 Diário do Comércio | Um Laptop por Crianca
22 Mar. 2006 Times Online | Getting the world's poor logged on
09 Mar. 2006 Correio Popular | País disputa fabricação de laptop de US$ 100
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo quer comprar 1 milhão de laptops
  Info Exame On Line | Governo quer um milhão de laptops de US$ 100
08 Mar. 2006 IDG Now | Faculdade abre programa de inclusão digital para alunos
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo negocia fabricação do laptop de US$ 100 no Brasil
  Agência Globo | Governo estuda possibilidade de produção de computador de US$ 100 no país
  Teletime News | DVB detalha contrapartidas oferecidas ao Brasil
05 Mar. 2006 ACM/CIE | Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the $100 laptop
16 Feb. 2006 MITIR | Podcast of Walter Bender's MURJ lecture on One Laptop per Child
15 Feb. 2006 CNET | PCs for the poor: Which design will win?
10 Feb. 2006 CNET | Perspective: Will the $100 PC fly?
09 Feb. 2006 NYTimes | A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for Developing Nations
  UPI | One Laptop Project reaches critical stages
31 Jan. 2006 Slashdot | Microsoft OS Smart Phone for Developing Nations
  USA Today | Gates sees cellphones as way to help Third World
  Macworld | Red Hat officially commits to MIT's $100 laptop
20 Dec. 2005 BusinessWeek online | Quanta faces challenges in making "millions and millions" of $100 laptops.
19 Dec. 2005 Forbes.com | China to decide by March whether to join OneLaptopPerChild project.
14 Dec. 2005 UPI | Nortel to take part in OneLaptopPerChild endeavor.
13 Dec. 2005 Red Herring | Quanta to manufacture laptops; expects deliveries in 2006 4th quarter.
11 Dec. 2005 NYTimes | NY Times: 5th Annual Year in Ideas $100 Laptop
01 Dec. 2005 RFDESIGN | $100 Laptops Feature Novel Peer-to-Peer Wireless Connectivity
30 Nov. 2005 FT.com | Five companies in Asia making bids to manufacture $100 laptop.
28 Nov. 2005 Fortune Magazine | THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: I'd Like to Teach the World to Type
25 Nov. 2005 People's Daily Online | Nigerian president says government has budgeted for a million $100 laptops.
17 Nov. 2005 BBC News | UN Debut for $100 Laptop for Poor
  Seattle Times | $100 Laptops Aim to Bring Children the World
  TechWhack | MIT Unveils their USD 100 Laptop
  ZDNet | '$100 Laptops' Here by Next Year
  ABC | $100 Laptop Bridges Digital Divide
  Financial Express | Laptop @$100!
16 Nov. 2005 MIT News Office | Annan to Present Prototype $100 Laptop at World Summit on Information Society
  CNET | $100 Laptop Takes World Stage
  CNET | $100 Laptop Expected in Late 2006
  Christian Science Monitor | A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child
14 Nov. 2005 WSJ | The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality
13 Nov. 2005 The Inquirer | Hubris over $100 Laptop idea
New York Times | Google Earmarks $265million for Charity and Social Causes
13 Oct. 2005 Technology Review | The Hundred Dollar Man: Technology Review's editor in chief, Jason Pontin, talk with Nicholas Negroponte about the Hundred Dollar Computer.
29 Sep. 2005 I4U News | Sub-$100 Laptop design unveiled
28 Sep. 2005 Boston Globe | Prototypes of $100 laptop with hand crank planned by early next year.
  MIT World | NN at Technology Review
27 Sep. 2005 Datamation | Low cost PCs for the Enterprise
06 Jun. 2005 estadao.com.br | Cada criança na escola com um laptop a tiracolo

Video

(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)


http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University