evan_tech

12:25 pm, 15 Mar 07

olpc

I now have an OLPC laptop to play around with.

Two main observations from having one physically instead of reading about it:

Holy crap is it slow. Simple apps take like seven seconds to launch. They're still working on performance, so this isn't a fair judgment yet to make; just commenting on the current state of things.
They're much smaller than you'd expect from the photos. If I stretch my thumb and pinky out to their widest it covers the breadth of the entire machine, including the keyboard.

I have some ideas about what to do with it, but if you have any I'd like to hear them.

jarodrussell Well. I guess I hate you know.

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- zenspider You guess?!?!?
  
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hober Oooooh, nice. How'd you get one?

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zanfur Reminds me of the tablets in Ender's Game ...

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Anonymous
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evan	Yep.
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jace	Source to the page? Source to the app? A map of the MIT Media Lab, its "source"?
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evan	It's just a button right now, and an obscure one (it's like the fourth symbol in its key, sharing it with + = and ~). Pressing it just sends a keypress to the OS, so it remains to be seen what it'll do. (I think it's kinda gimmicky.)
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medlir	Cool, I always through the neatest feature was the hand-crank for power. I use an old 400MHz IBM ThinkPad with 128M of RAM for remote wifi use usually, so speed/lack of speed sounds comparable. But that is smaller than I thought they were from the pictures though. How did you end up getting one? Through the big G?
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evan	This processor is comparable in MHz but way slower. And the display driver is probably not as nice as the ThinkPad's. Yeah, through work.
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medlir	I'm also running Windows XP on the 400MHz ThinkPad so it's probably dragged down more than it would be if I ran something a little more lightweight. :D But for occasional recreational web browsing, IRC, and audio playing, it serves it's purpose.
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Anonymous	gnome and firefox are slow even on a fully modern PC. im amused that they chose both to build their system off of.. but i guess you cant expect a bunch of african children or whatever to use dwm and vi and dillo?
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Anonymous	Did they tell you how much L2 cache it has? Zero I bet, those flip-flops have to be powered, unlike most RAM. Does it have microphone or audio line input? I'd like to see how quick it runs CMU Sphinx II.
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