What every government should ask itself when considering an ebook deployment
The viewpoints expressed hereunder do not necessarily reflect the opinion of OLPC. They are an input by the free and volunteering community supporting OLPC.
| Questions and answers to/by the Competition | OLPC |
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| What do you recommend? The laptop, the tablet or an ebook? Eh ... the one I'm making most profit/commission on! | What do you recommend? The laptop, the tablet or an ebook?
The worldwide OLPC community has discussed this thoroughly. All have their advantages. The OLPC XO doesn't put you for a choice. It is all four at the same time: a laptop for real intensive working and typing. When you twist the screen and fold it backwards, the XO is an ebook, with buttons as our youngest kids don't have the small hand coordination necessary for some applications on the web. The XO-4 Touch also has a touch screen, so you have ... a tablet. All with a solar Photovoltaic panel so the kids and families can recharge and make some money - e.g. from charging rechargeable batteries - iso that this costs them money. Last year some students who had their XO's for the 3rd year - turned their XO's into robots.
(picture on the right: OLPC XO in Peru and Uruguay. Students invented how to make a robot out of the XO. One XO is the sender/receiver/controller that can be programmed. The second XO has been foreseen of wheels, a motor, etc. A robot ... The lessons on robotica are now being broadcasted on the national OLPC TV Channel. Yes there is a national OLPC TV Channel with lessons, reports and competitions. A very vibrant community! http://laptop.org/images/flash/OLPC_laptop_360.swf |
| Does your laptop have an own TV Channel, can it be turned into a robot and does your laptop brings you coffee? Eh ? | Does your laptop have an own TV Channel, can it be turned into a robot and does your laptop brings you coffee? Of course the XO can bring coffee!
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| Mr Minister, when were you convinced this laptop was the one you wanted for your kids? Look at how flashy our flyers are ! | Mr Minister, when were you convinced this laptop was the one you wanted for your kids? When the XO transformed itself into a robot, drove off, a bit later came back and presented me my coffee ! I was sold! |
| Are you selling a throw away product or an easy to repair and update product? Throw away and short after registering, we offer your fast device a free software upgrade so it gets bloated with stuff that's irrelevant and so your machine slows down. Our specialists will then consider your problem and advise you to buy a bigger hard disc or upgrade the processor or buy additional RAM, only to offer you a couple of months later again a free software upgrade, so your device becomes bloated again with irrelevant stuff and you get into a cycle of continuous upgrading, printers that don't work anymore because of compatibility issues and eventually you'll throw everything out and buy a new one. And a new printer. | Are you selling a throw away product or an easy to repair and update product? At OLPC and the worldwide OLPC community, your kids/our kids, the minister of education are not considered a market nor a product. Universal Primary education with an open hardware and software rugged laptop for our and your kids is our mission. The XO's have been designed with rough kids handling in mind. Basically what you want for kids is a very rugged box that protects the laptop, rounded cordners, strong hinges, a strong handle so kids automatically take the laptop right at hand, and two strong holes where the computer can be attached to a belt e.g. The XO is 3 devices in one: a pc with a keyboard, it can be twisted and flipped backwards and becomes an ebook, and with the XO-4 you also have a touch screen and it becomes a tablet. Never buy tablets without a strong protection for the screen. The XO is honest and gives a very very strong protective cover on all sides. The XO is made for the hardest environments out there: kids hands! You can drop it on the floor, on pointy stones, drop it on its corners... it will survive. And even if something breaks, the XO is made with easy repair in mind: with one and the same screw-driver you can open de laptop and see what causes the failure. Spare parts and upgrades are very cheap and most repairs and update replacements can be done by and in the school. There's plenty of people in the OLPC community that help out to help you detect the failure and help you repair an XO. More on the dedicated repair pages of the world wide OLPC community: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair
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| How do you protect the device from kids rough handling? What additional adaptations have you made to make it kids-proof? Eh ... nothing really. | How do you protect the device from kids rough handling? What additional adaptations have you made to make it kids-proof? OLPC-XO's have been designed with rough kids handling in mind. Basically what you want for kids is a very rugged box that protects the laptop, rounded corners, spill-proof/drizzle rain proof sealed rubber-membrane keyboard, strong hinges where the screen is attached to the keyboard  |
| How do you reduce costs for the Ministry of Education, the kids and families? How do your laptops put themselves in a wireless network? Not | How do you reduce costs for the Ministry of Education, the kids and families? How do your laptops put themselves in a wireless network? With OLPC you connect to the worldwide open source and open hardware community. As a ministry and education community, you get a place next to the ministries of education of countries s.a. Uruguay, Peru, Rwanda, Haiti, Mongolia, the United States, and of course the worldwide community of open source and hardware users and developers. The laptops put themselves in a network automatically and become the internet. Before wifi, and when not part of data-providing institutions, s.a. universities with databases full of useful information, or the public transport company, or the government with websites with loads of useful information, one needed the service to get access to these linked computer databases and networks that form the internet. Since the introduction of wifi, our laptops can bridge and help connect to sites holding interesting info.  Two 'bunny ear' antenna on either side of the display swivel upwards. Doing this reveals USB and audio ports, normally sealed from the elements, and also extends the wireless range significantly to over 150 m and field tests even indicated ranges to 200 m. Wikipedia's article on Ad hoc routing protocol notes that: "Transmitting a signal half the distance requires one fourth of the energy and if there is a node in the middle willing spend another fourth of its energy for the second half, data would be transmitted for half of the energy than through a direct transmission." Marvell's card is designed to scale to very low power usage. Lower power output allows for less wasted battery. Longer range transmissions are also possible with lower power/bandwidth, allowing a large area to be covered by the mesh. An Active Antenna provides the same wireless mesh network interface in a USB peripheral. It may be used to connect a School server or other computer to the mesh network, simultaneously repeating any packets on the local mesh. It may also be provided with only power, in which case it acts solely as a repeater to extend the mesh. Details on the card itself can be found on the wireless page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wireless |
| How many of specifically these laptops have you actually sold? What experience do you have deploying your laptops nation wide? None. A couple of thousand? Note: propriety software, version x and hardware component y will react differently to e.g. printers/internet/etc. than a twin copy laptop with propriety software, version x+1 and hardware component y or propriety software, version x and hardware component y+1. Let alone all other combinations. The fact is there isn't a single producer that comes near the numbers as OLPC: OLPC has NATION wide deployments! | How many of specifically these laptops have you sold? What experience do you have deploying your laptops nation wide? OLPC XO laptops and server combinations have been sold in excess of 2 million. OLPC: The fact is there isn't a single producer that comes near the numbers as OLPC: OLPC has NATION wide deployments!
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| How do you help protecting our kids against porn and crap content? You can subscribe to a list with such sites and then block their access. | How do you help protecting our kids against porn and crap content? The XO laptops put themselves in an internet. That is your kids internet. How many of your fellow kids would host crap on their laptops? The OLPC community contributes to such child approved list to where they can surf. But even more basically, we don't pay for connecting to internet sites that don't provide access to their sites for free. Doesn't the Ministry of Education want kids and parents and teachers to be able to reach its website? Then why doesn't the Ministry of Education put a wifi antenna to the server that hosts its website? All our laptops are equipped with wifi antenna's. Our kids can capture the website of the Ministry. Idem the hours of the bus. Doesn't the bus company want us to know that for free? Let them also connect a wifi antenna. Our OLPC kids will help distribute it to each other. What site do you actually want to visit that you have to pay for? The wikipedia? It's open source, you can host it on an OLPOC XS-Server and distribute it for free. The only websites that are not free are porn sites and those of the same sort. They want you to pay to get access to their data. But, we don't take them up in our networks and certainly don't distribute them via our wifi equipped OLPC XS-Server. Remember, the internet with interesting info, that you and us, the internet are we. Our OLPC-XO kids have free communication, video webcalling among them. Switch to Open Source and join ! Further, kids are not impressed by porn, they just click it away: "...again that adult crap...". Just as publicity. |
| How many different screws are there in the laptop? 8 Different types, needing 3 different, difficult to find hence expensive screwdrivers and some other tools to lift things! | How many different screws are there in the laptop? OLPC laptops/ebooks have 1 type of screws, can be unscrewed easily with the same easy to find standard screwdriver. OLPC laptops are made to be repaired, even by kids !!! Again, kids nor the ministry of education is to be considered as a market, they are OLPC's mission !
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| Are you an open hardware and software project? No. | Are you an open hardware and software project? Yes. OLPC is just like the wikipedia, wikibooks, like linux and open office ... we combine the power of massive collaboration with massive orders to get minimum prices.
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| Our tabblet has a faster processor. Yep. | Maybe but we have the nicer user experience. The latest processor is the http://www.marvell.com/application-processors/armada/pxa2128/ = 1.2GHz. Nevertheless, sleek selling technique. We've had the same courses in marketing and sales. Out of a 101 points to take into consideration, you point to 1 and keep hammering into that one. But Ministries of Education and the Education sector is smarter than that. They have ICT professors and specialists too, who get into a debate and come to the right conclusions. Processor speed is just 1 factor out of many to create a nice user experience. At OLPC, we come in from a birds-eye perspective, from a school, several schools, hundreds and thousands of students and teachers and the whole ministry of education. Don't you want to take advantage of that? E.g. isn't it logical to have a tandem: fast XServer processor for the whole school, and a cheaper processor in every single laptop? You want to push all your money in expensive processors in every laptop? Doesn't sound like smart allocation of a buget ! Isn't the XO-XServer configuration going to bring all a much longer way for the same buck? So are you faster per laptop / can you give a better user - teacher - minister of education experience than our XO-XServer combination? Besides, maybe you have a faster processor now - for a couple of months. But with our next upgrade, we'll put in another, faster processor and then we'll be faster. Do you know who our technical partners are? E.g. Google and Marvell. For now the XO features "Marvell optimized ARMv7 dual high-performance mobile processors with hSMP running at up to 1.2GHz. The ARMADA PXA2128 provides robust 3D graphics, video, audio, and image processing acceleration features, as well as full-featured system management and modem/radio interfaces." XO's are made to be upgraded. 1 Standard screwdrawer and all the same screws. Our teachers and kids are taught how to do that and - oh - be sure they understand about computers whilst taking it apart and back together. And yours? At OLPC - and actually anybody who comes with a solution at this level, we prefer to put 1 cheap processor in every tabblet and keep the money for 1 very fast processor in the XServer. What does a kid needs so much processing power for? For when it is thinking about filling out a spreadsheet? Thinking whilst doing math? Writing or reading a book? Certainly not. Surfing the web. Yes, but the XServer does the bulk of that and sends back fast processeable chunks. Even playing games is very possible on the XO. Even online games. Why? Because the XO's operating system is hyper-small and not bloathed with code and unnecessary software. You know what you have to do when your laptop at home gets slow: switch to linux and open software. XO's are an adapted Linux for kids and learning and all software is open source, no hidden updates that bloath your laptop with software and viruses. Just common sense: fast processor in the XServer, cheap processor in the XO tabblets and all updatable with a single screwdrawer. Our XO's put themselves in a network all by themselves. Show us that. And when your fast tabblet runs out of power after a couple of hours and its battery is broken after so many charging cycles, our XO-kids are still working as their XO laptop has a lot of features that make them very energy efficient and then they go way past yours. The XO's display-controller chip (DCON) comes with memory that enables the display to remain live with the processor suspended. The DCON also formats data for the display. The Liquid-crystal display is the basis of our extremely low power architecture. The XO is usable while the CPU and much of the motherboard is regularly turned off (and on) so quickly that it's imperceptible to the user. Huge power savings are harvested in this way (e.g. by turning stuff on the motherboard off when it's not being used (if even for a few seconds), while keeping the display on). More: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware |
| What are your ideals? Make as much profit as possible. E.g. use tiny little hidden screws, so that when you want to repair the laptop, you break something beyond repair and you void the warrenty. We sneak in a laptop very cheaply and we don't tell you we're actually going to make money by selling you all kind of "services", proprietary soft and hardware that's programmed to fail and things you don't need afterwards. We make you good consumers. Look out for the next container load as they have the newer and improved charger 2X which of course doesn't fit with the original charger, which you'll have to dispose off, but the 2X is so much better looking :) ? | What are your ideals? Millennium Development Goal nr. 2: Bringing Universal Primary Education. The OLPC laptop is both an open hardware as software project. The hardware and operating system is dedicated to kids. Hardware: the keyboard is made for children's fingers. They are no use to adults to prevent stealing. They are also the greenest laptops in the world. They consume very little power. No toxic elements have been used.   OLPC has a youtube channel - watch these 2' video's and see what kind of people support OLPC:
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| Can your laptop be powered straight by a PV panel? No | Can your laptop be powered straight by a PV panel? YES, OLPC laptops are quoted to be the greenest laptops around. They need very little power and the little they need can be provided by plugging in a light flexible PV panel. The screen is so that kids can read them even when they are in direct sunlight. 
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| Does your laptop's vision aligns and helps the Ministry of Education / Schools / Principles / Educators / Kids connecting with Open Source collaboration projects? No | Does your laptop's vision aligns and helps the Ministry of Education / Schools / Principles / Educators / Kids connecting with Open Source collaboration projects? Yes, that's one of OLPC's founding principles. With connected laptops, learners are liberated to actively engage with others with similar missions and harnassing the free power and intelligence that is available world wide: connecting teachers to collaborate in making the BEST book for their discipline, connecting to wikibooks, a sister project of the wikipedia, and many many more. |
| What anti-theft strategy do you have? None ... buy software to prevent and relocate laptops? | What anti-theft strategy do you have? Theft has been taken into account from the concept. After all OLPC was meant for the poorest first. Every laptop is unique and can be switched-off from a distance. All parts are logged. Apart from that there's some other factors: OLPC goes for region wide deployments, every kid gets a laptop, no one gets left out. So why steal one when you have one of your own. An adult running around with these very distinguishable OLPC laptops? You'd make a fool out of yourself. Everybody knows they're for kids only. Besides your adult fingers don't fit on the keyboard. You'll get very annoyed very quickly. And who are you going to sell it to? Everyone has one. And it's switched off from a distance anyhow. And we CAN trace you .. it's all networked after all, isnt' it? |
| Do you come with a solution or with a problem? Just throwing in some laptops inside a school is a problem. Where to turn for free support? What software should be on it? How does that software work? Didn't we want interactive ebook versions of our school-books? My laptop doesn't reboot, what now? | Do you come with a solution or with a problem? 100% spot on! OLPC is an education project, not a laptop project. Just throwing in some laptops inside a school is a problem and can be a drain for very valuable money. With OLPC you connect to a worldwide community of supporters that go for open and free soft and hardware. Indeed, the OLPC laptops are easy to open and to exchange some component with a newer version. That way you always have an up to date machine. OLPC laptops are made to last, not programmed to fail ! OLPC is not a laptop project, hence OLPC doesn't "throw laptops" inside classrooms and then let's the teachers and the minister of education take the heat. OLPC comes with a staged approach:
More: Deployment and Deployment guide |
| Do you have an open platform for collaboration among users? No | Do you have an open platform for collaboration among users? Yes, several. OLPC offers a wiki, discussion mailing lists an even chatrooms for instant feedback and solution providing. More and more schools and governments make financial resources available to be present in these chatrooms to feedback governments / ministries / teachers and kids that have questions; be they organizational, hardware, software, or whatever. |
| Does your laptop generates money? No, it just costs money. | Does your laptop generates money? Yes, OLPC educational project normally print CO2e certificates, i.e. CO2e money. A normal laptop uses x+1 kWh, an OLPC laptop only uses x kWh and whatever that little bit of energy is, it produces it with PV panels. |
| Do you think environmental safety is important in the hands of kids? Eh, yes? | Do you think environmental safety is important in the hands of kids? OLPC XO's are said to be the greenest in the world according to e.g. IEEE 1680 Consumer Electronics Environmental Impact as per EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool). XO appears destined to be the first laptop to receive their Gold Rating, it has even been suggested that the XO may warrant establishing a new, even higher rating. The XO is also complient with RoHS 
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| What do you see as possible outcomes from implementing your laptop/ebook/tablet? Eh? | What do you see as possible outcomes from implementing your laptop/ebook/tablet? Here are some things that have been mentioned as positive outcomes from an OLPC project. Many of these observations come very early in the project.
This list could also be considered reasons for launching a project.
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| Any final remarks? That's a laptop for poor kids. Our's is for executives! And the previous ones I sold you, they're outdated and catching dust somewhere. You just need to buy something new from me! Again: look how crisp and glossy my publicity is and my costume ! | Any final remarks? Mr President, the kids took a screwdriver, mounted wheels on their XO laptop, transformed in front of your eyes into a robot and you're drinking the coffee the laptop just fetched you. That's not a laptop for poor kids, that's a laptop for kids that want to learn how to world works! At least their world works, is open, free and connected and above they're not even surprised that it works and not afraid of their future! Their future just brought you a coffee! These are certainly not catching dust! These kids are probably figuring out how to make it happen that their XO is taking of the dust, doing the ironing, the washing, feed the cattle and water the garden!
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