first machine in cambridge
by Christopher Blizzard
We received our first machine in the Cambridge today from the plant. This is one of the hand-assembled models running the browser in Sugar. I have a less blurry picture that was taken using the flash, but the display doesn’t look as good.
Update: There are some more pictures in the wiki! Even one where I look pretty grumpy.
Gee… that’s great! Way to go Chris! I had a mockup of this green-white version of the OLPC-laptop in my hands at last weeks Ubuntu Developer Summit… totally sweet!
Best regards…
MacSlow
Cool. Any pictures of people using the generator widget?
unusually big stone on the goban… ;-)
honestly i didn’t think that the green color would work so well.
The machine looks like it has three touchpads… is there a reason for that?
It has one touchpad but it’s got two parts. The center part is a regular touchpad but the entire thing can be used with a stylus for drawing. We don’t have the stylus bits working just yet. That’s waiting for some adjustments.
Most. Inspiring. Open (mostly :-) ) Source Project. Ever.
All the respins and fixes and improvements going on at every level — from the ASICs to LinuxBIOS to drivers to Linux to networking to X Windows to the formats (Crossmark!) to the apps — would be amazing even if you were making a single $5000 laptop. I hope the upstream projects can benefit and keep up!
Is that second picture the black+white mode? The first thing I noticed was how good the fonts looked.
The browser looks really great. Will it handle most of the common browser add-ons eventually?
The big test is how well it runs seti@home!
Just waiting for it!!
And you look great as before :P
The second picture is in black and white mode. It’s hard to take a picture of it with a flash because it is reflective, and individual pixels seem to reflect the flash – just like a real mirror.
Whats the deal with the antennas on the sides? If they are given to most of the kids I know they’ll be broken off within a week, lol
Congratulations, Christopher (and the whole now-sleeping team)!
Hmm, what do Sony think about the Playstation buttons? I thought they’d copyrighted those?
The antennas are obviously quite sturdy. The buttons only have a passing resemblance to those on a Sony controller, and there are no patents that I know of on alphanumeric symbols and geometric shapes.
Too glossy :P
Your quote: “… the display doesn’t look as good.” is a bold-faced lie. That is some of the crispest, most beautiful text I have EVER seen on any electronic display that wasn’t an E-Ink prototype. the only (insignificant) problems I can notice are the “rainbow” effect, which is typical of most reflective displays, and glare, which is universal. Your lovely charity could paint these a boring color (black, white or gray), sell these for US $400 and corner the e-book market for a decade. The profits could then be used to subsidize more machines. Fortunately, you won’t. :)
I wonder if the OLPC distro’s graphical environment turns off anti-aliasing in black and white mode? At 200 dpi, which is almost as good as paper, you shouldn’t NEED it, it would save a tiny bit of system resources, and most people wouldn’t notice or care. I read on the wiki that the DCON chip gives you anti-aliasing free in color mode, so I doubt you’d need to do any software anti-aliasing in the first place.
Also, my compliments and thanks to all the people (including yourself) who may have brought forth what may be the most innovative thing to come to portable computing since Apple’s original Powerbook.
–JM
Great idea, Hope it is possibe to run Linux Ubuntu on the machine then it will be a success. I will be interested to buy one 100$ machine and give away to a needing child in a development country.
I agree with J.McNair. In fact I’d suggest you make a Black Case version for adults. This way you have an extra market for first world users and a distinction between the ‘Childrens’ green version and the Adult version.
I can easily imagine an order for 1 Million from US stores. And thats just for the inital quantity.
This neatly solves the concerns I had for selling OLPC laptops on eBay etc.
I agree with George’s point. I also firmly believe that greater awareness of the effort should be brought to the philanthropic community around the world. If free access to information is truly the great equalizer, there could be no greater gift for a child, especially during this time of the year.Can you imagine the type of goodwill that could be unleashed if a non-profit organization dedicated itself solely to turning contributions into distributions of these laptops around the developing world?
Thanx for the pics, they are really nice!
Oh I like that! Nice post.
This place is alright…I’ll be back for sure.