‘One Laptop per Child’ plan faces low battery life
His name is Nicholas Negroponte, and one project over the course of the past several years has earned him tremendous amounts of attention: One Laptop per Child. He founded MIT’s Media Lab, where researchers work on creating “sociable” robots, new visual displays made out of cloth, and novel ways for humans to interact with computers. Negroponte also helped found Wired Magazine. I don’t for the slightest moment doubt Negroponte’s intelligence, but the One Laptop per Child project has culminated in a relative disaster.
This past Sunday, Negroponte spoke at the American Association...
There's a much better alternative for many of the same customers. I work for NComputing, a company that uses virtualization technology to deliver PC access that taps the excess power of today's PCs and shares it among multiple simultaneous users at very, very low costs. This takes advantage of the multibillion dollar development budgets that drive Moore's Law. It makes much more sense to share the power and to let Intel and AMD keep developing faster and faster CPUs than it does to try to get costs out by developing obsolete systems.
The headline," ‘One Laptop per Child’ plan faces low battery life", seems to me to be misleading when the only comment in the article about the battery is this: "From a hardware standpoint, the battery life of five hours is impressive, given the small size and low weight of the unit."
Is this a news article? It seems more like an opinion piece.
Battery life is 8 hours with backlight, 15 hours without the backlight. It supports Youtube the day Adobe comes and provides an optimized Flash player for the OLPC hardware. It automatically transfers all saved documents to the School server directly or over the Internet. The student doesn't have to think, just click the Save button and the document is saved online, the teacher, parents, other students can immediately all see the saved document.
The OS OLPC is working on is the best ever made. Just click on an icon to launch the application, what else do you need.
The keyboard is just fine also for adults, 13 million adults are satisfied with the blackberry keyboard, this one is large enough to type at full speed even for adults, just spend 5 minutes to get used to it. Children won't type so fast even with a full sized keyboard anyways.
"Yet numerous reviewers have noted that the ruggedized keyboard is so awkward and cramped as to be close to unusable for extended periods of time. The squishy keys almost beg for typing errors."
please remember that these reviewiers are adults with big adult fingers, and that the form factor of the XO is designed for a child in mind. i have not seen a single review from a child that says that the keyboard is hard to use, in fact ive seen a review where the child actually prefers it over a normal sized keyboard.
"Also, the trackpad is not very responsive, causing pointer lag, at least on the revisions of the unit that were briefly, commercially available this past winter. "
"Its processor has difficulty rendering even relatively simple Web site"
the mouse issue was a bug in the software and has long since been resolved. please research before you review. the browser has a bug in it as well, and is being taken care of at this moment, you can read about the developments the olpc team are making at dev.laptop.org if you dont know.
"and YouTube videos are far beyond its reach."
altho youtube is a popular site here in the US, im highly dubious of the educational need for children to be able to view youtube videos. if youtube viewing is an absolute must and a valid benchmark for computer performance, there is a workaround online to be able to view youtube videos smoothly on an XO.