I had a daughter who clicked her way thru info, and now she is DEFINING it. She is very excited to know a whole set of other children her age, that didn’t have a voice, can now be heard.

After playing around and watching my daughter play around some more we came to the following conclusion:

Her mouse pad would get jiggly only if she left her hands on it when booting up or starting a new activity. Hands off during the process and no more skitty mouse.

I think there is a way to extend the video record time via some terminal commands. I am not knowledgeable enough and can’t find a comprehensive guide to Terminal and SU (bash 32) commands to do it without copying what someone else has done.

This is not a Mac Laptop pro or a 2ghz processor. It does what it is supposed to do. Read the comments about the laptops in Peru.

Regards

My sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone at OLPC who made this possible.

OLPC got hardware out the door (relatively) admirably, i.e. no **major** delays, recalls, etc. Looking at the game console / commercial operating system release delays of recent years, this was no small feat, and for a non-profit to boot.

The initial sugar releases were almost unbearably unpolished (think windows 3.1, dos, and early mozilla). The initial design group was relatively small, which led to lots of bugs and a few, in my humble opinion, flawed design decisions (journal vs. filesystem should be more cooperative, rather than mutually exclusive). These issues were irksome but, hey! It’s software, so it can be updated, and it’s open-source, so i can participate. The G1G1 was pure genious in terms of getting a few thousand fat fingered, techno-lusty linux-heads like me to pitch in with bug squashing, documenting, etc. etc. etc.

Now if I could just get that swap partition working!!

- The OLPC shoots video at 4 times the resolution of most cell phones.

A DVD player is not substitute for an XO lpatop.

- a DVD player does not run for 8 hours on a battery.
- it needs a separate display device that requires even more power.
- DVDs cannot be viewed in full sunlight
- breaks/fails easily in dusty or wet environments.
- fails when dropped.
- is NOT expandable.
- Software and information (content) cannot be shared between players.

The OLPC XO is a complete, personal, editable, device that allows users to create, share and distribute all content they create or obtain from others. Groups of users can also collaborate with each other via their XO laptops.

A DVD player is fixed read-only device that does not allow collaboration. It is nothing, but a device for consumers of media content.

BTW, you can add a DVD player to an OLPC via a USB cable if that is what you really want.

I also wish the active antennas for the XS (= “School”) Server wouldn’t be quite as proprietary and scarce. I’d love to set a server up in my basement using standard (cisco / artem / belkin / …) pcmcia or usb wirelss devices, just to fool around with it and maybe once I got it running (maybe with dansguardian content filtering implemented) donate it to our local school system.

Again: I LOVE the project.

One of the other things that’s a little disappointing about it, but in reality most things are great about it, is the video quality of the compression and playback is a little overly blocky. It’d be nice if they could set up a more higher quality (and memory intensive) compression using resolution playback closer to the VGA quality of the stills. I did expect better video playback quality. But it’s probably not a big deal and more important for those adults using it as a toy who were sponsors in the US.

As for the fat fingers, yep I have them, and I find working on my daughter’s computer slow and cumbersome, which is why I have a MacBook Pro. The XO is not designed for Children and adults should not expect that it will have the same proportions as adult machines.

The track pad – no excuses here. It is does not function properly all the time and is very touchy. I am hopeful that this will be an area of major improvement.

Networking – What an area of tremendous frustration in my home. The fact that the XO shipped without support for most of the major wireless security protocols and required a new build/upgrade was very frustrating. In fact even after upgrading to build 565 it is baffling to me that the wireless access password has to be entered each and every time. This makes handling pass phrases cumbersome.

On the plus side, my daughter has a laptop for 200 dollars that provides, video, chat, audio recordings, wireless access, a simplistic (yet functional) interface, word processing all in a rugged enough package that I feel comfortable letting her take it to school and on field trips. The XO creates a world of possibilities for children all over the world and for that we as a community should look for ways to support the product and goals…

That is the whole reason to distribute the XO instead of some bloat-ware from Microsoft.

On the other hand, I would love for Bender and Negroponte to come see my son’s eyes fall when the trackpad goes crazy–again! If anything, it’s turning him off to computing.