I'm really eager to get mine (ordered on the third day, so I haven't heard any news on shipping dates...though I've heard that first day orders have begun to ship). It'll be the coolest lappy in the room at conferences, and YC events.
Yeah, I'd love to get one to play with and try and use seriously for a while. It'll be even better to give the future version of the XO to any kids I may have. I wonder what percentage of kids will discover the "view/edit source" button and at what age.
Weird as it may sound, I plan to use it as my primary laptop when traveling and when working from the bubble tea shops over on Castro. All I need is ssh and a browser (I use vim, which runs fine remotely), though I also plan to buy a 16GB USB drive for extra storage...keeping a local working copy of my projects will mean I don't have to have connectivity to work, though I suspect it'll be slower than working on the server when WiFi is available.
I like little lappies anyway--my current one is a Dell 700n, and I only got it instead of a smaller one because the smaller ones were twice as expensive.
I too plan to use mine as my primary travel laptop. I've realized that 97.482% of the time I'm just coding/web browsing/emailing/chatting, which doesn't require too much horsepower. I also think the XO will make an excellent ebook reader. Screw the Kindle!
It will be a pleasant downgrade from the ginormous 17" PowerBook I've been lugging around for the past 4 years.
Unfortunately at this point the "view/edit source" button is exactly the same as on browsers... view source. It only works for web pages and it's not editable. I think the editable version is in the works.
I do think it's a great idea, but I imagine it would be very overwhelming for a kid who has never used a computer before, let alone programmed (in a foreign language, too, most likely).
What would be really neat was if in addition to opening the source, it also had some sort of dynamic tutorial that would explain what the kid was looking at. For example, they open up a webpage and it explains the HTML to them.
That's disappointing. Where did you see that? I was under the impression that it was going to work like an old Lisp Machine where even the OS code could be changed on the fly, just in python.
Someone on #olpc on irc.freenode.net mentioned it a couple days ago. I do think they're still working on it, it's just not going to be ready right away.
I'm glad to see this project working out. I saw Negroponte give a presentation about the OLPC at UCLA a year ago, and it was amazing how genuinely enthusiastic he was about it.
USD$188 per pupil isn't exactly chump change. Hopefully the increase in volume from early customers like Uruguay will reduce the price for future customers.
