“One laptop per child”
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introduction

The era of the humble school exercise book is under threat by a two pronged attack, A pair of technological rivals competing for pudgy fingers as they announce ambitious plans to equip every child with a laptop computer.
One Laptop Per Child, OLPC is an open source system. To give us an in depth view of OLPC Capital’s Mina Yirga discussed the project with Thomas Rolf experts follows:

Could you tell us about your background?
I have 11 years of private sector expertise in International ICT Business Management. Before joining GTZ Ethiopia in 2006 as ICT Manager, I worked in Germany , Brazil , and the Philippines , holds two Master Degrees, is married and has two children. 
Could you elaborate on the project idea?
“One laptop per child” is a concept. It is an education project, not a laptop project. It can be implemented in more than one way and is by no means restricted to the embodiment of the OLPC non-profit association’s so-called “$100 Laptop.” The argument for OLPC is simple: many children-especially in rural parts of developing countries-have little access to school-in some cases school is just a tree. Building schools and training teachers is only oneway and perhaps the slowest to alleviate the situation. While such building programs and teacher education must continue, another and parallel method advised by OLPC is to leverage the children by engaging them more directly in their own learning. It may sound implausible to equip the poorest children with connected laptops when even rich children may not have them. However laptops can be affordable and poor children are more capable than they are given credit for.

Where is the OLPC made?
Research and Development as well as Sales are conducted by OLPC which is a non profit organisation. That means no costs are charged for R&D and Sales which would usually be 30% of a laptop’s value. The actual pure manufacturing is by Quanta in Taiwan.
What are the features that make OLPC appealing?
There are several of which Five are core to the concept, they are child ownership, target the lower ages, saturation cover total connection and last free and open source software.
The OLPC is not a stripped down version of today's laptop; We have fundamentally reconsidered personal computer architecture-hardware, software, and display. Unlike the usual laptop, the OLPC machine.Creates its own mesh network out of the box as each machine is a full-time wireless router. Children as well as their teachers and families in the remotest regions will be connected both to one another and to the Internet.
It also features a 7.5-inch, 1200×900-pixel TFT screen and self-refreshing display with higher resolution (200 DPI) than 95% of the laptops on the market today. Two display modes are available: a transmissive, full-color mode; and a reflective, high-resolution mode that is sunlight readable. Both of these modes consume very little power: the transmissive mode consumes one watt—about one seventh of the average LCD power consumption in a laptop; the reflective mode consumes a miserly 0.2 watts.
The unit can selectively suspend operation of its CPU, which makes possible further remarkable power savings. The laptop nominally consumes less than two watts-less than one tenth of what a standard laptop consumes-so little that it can even be recharged by human (pedal) power. This is a critical advance for the half-billion children who have no access to electricity.
 
Could you elaborate on the educational benefits?
 -OLPC is predicated upon three basic premises:
Learning and high-quality education for all is essential to provide a fair, equitable, economically and socially viable society,
Access to mobile laptops on a sufficient scale provides real benefits for learning and dramatic improvement of education on a national scale;
However, so long as computers remain unnecessarily expensive, such potential gains remain a privilege of a select few. By providing our most powerful tool for knowledge creation, development, and discovery to children and their teachers and by -bandwidth connectivity to enable the development of knowledge communities, we now have the means to address seemingly intractable and critically important educational issues.
 
Does it have Ms-windows application? Is it efficient as windows?
 
Who says Windows is efficient?? (except Microsoft?). However, the laptop is an open-source machine: free software gives children the opportunity to fully own the machine in every sense. While we don't expect every child to become a programmer, we don't want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines. We are using open document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children-and their teachers-will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content. The first generation’s-core electronics begin with the 400Mhz AMD Geode processor. There are 128MB of dynamic RAM and 512MB of SLC NAND flash memory on board. The basic integrated operating system is a “skinny” Fedora distribution of Linux. The user interface is specially designed to support collaborative learning and teaching: every activity comes with a support network of teachers and children, so learning need not be an isolated, lonely endeavour.

What do you have in store for the near future?
I wouldn’t call it a plan but there is a vision:
To launch “one laptop per child” in Ethiopia : two-hundred thousand laptops in the first step to be deployed in Ethiopia with emphasis on rural, remote and the poorest areas.