The program is to be funded initially by federal governments, though Negroponte plans for funding to come from other sources in the future, including countries sponsoring other countries, child-to-child funding, commercial subsidies and micro-philanthropy.
Despite the obvious benefits, there is the potential that the laptops may fall into the wrong hands. Negroponte responds by saying that if you can create no market for the product, there won't be any incentive to sell it on -- the laptops will never be sold commercially.
Negroponte uses the example that a US postal truck has never been stolen in the world. It doesn't matter what colour you paint it, it still looks like a postal truck. With this in mind, security precautions have gone into the unique looking laptop. If a laptop is stolen before arriving at a school it is totally useless. Additionally if it is stolen from a child it will be disabled after a certain period of time (which will be determined by individual countries). And as only students and teachers will be entitled to own one, it will look a bit odd if they are used by someone else.
But isn't it possible for a country such as Pakistan to lash a bunch together and make a supercomputer? Negroponte's response is -no", because OLPC holds the key that allows access to each laptop. Though they could theoretically remove components from a machine.
When it comes to support from the telecommunication industry, Negroponte (who is a board member at Motorola) has had mixed success, which according to him is controlled by carriers, not mobile manufacturers.
BT has been the most enthusiastic carrier to support the program, to date. Negroponte says "their enthusiasm is boundless". Vodafone has been harder to deal with due to their operations being more autonomous in each country, and he's even been referred to by Telefonica as a "telecommunications terrorist".
Perhaps this is because Negroponte wants the telcos to share their towers with his program, to which he adds that "they don't necessarily represent the consumers to say the least". Thought despite some opposition, he says he isn't a persona non grata within the industry, at least not yet.
While the laptop is designed for ages six to 16, it is tilted towards younger children. A possible future black model has been suggested to "lift the age up" for older children.
Although the target audience is younger than most traditional laptop users, Negroponte assures us that "this is a real computer", with the goal to make it "very, very high end. [There's] nothing cheap about this laptop." If so, it sounds like it will be designed better than his existing one: "My computer crashes five times a day ... it's a battle".
He believes part of the problem is the innate behaviour of programmers to constantly add more features to programs. Negroponte declares that "every single software release has been worse than its predecessor", adding that the version of Word that he uses is so old that it's not supported anymore. However "the Linux community is no better ... [it's] the entire software community".
The laptop on hand wasn't the final version, but the planned specifications are rather impressive, given the minimal budget:
- 500Mhz AMD x86 processor
- 128Mb DRAM
- 512Mb flash memory (No hard disk drive)
- SD Card slot
- Runs on 2 watts of power (15 - 20x less than current laptops) -- charged manually
- 3 USB ports
- stereo sound -- 2 audio outs
- 802.11s Wi-Fi mesh network
- Rugged design
- dual mode display (transmissive and reflective -- the display reflects sunlight so you can see it in broad daylight.)
- built-in camera
- video support
- support for 5-6 languages
Luke Anderson travelled to the NetEvents Global Press Summit in Hong Kong as a guest of NetEvents.
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Come and see the OLPC XO-1 and some of the geeks behind it at linux.conf.au early next year: http://lca2007.linux.org.au/