I brought my new camera to the meeting last night and took a bunch of photos.
In addition to addressing the primary subject of his talk (which was excellent, by the way), Ben had also been to visit the people at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and they sent along an intern with one of the laptops for us to see, apparently hoping to entice some of us into making games for it. You’ll see some of them in the photos.
The device is pretty interesting — it runs on ridiculously low power for modern computers (it reminds me of the Palm in that sense). It’s rugged, has two video modes (a high-res black and white mode that uses almost no power but has a high-reflectance display, and a lower res color mode that’s backlit). It has a 300-something MHz CPU, running a specialized version of Linux. Many of the apps are written in Python (yay!). It can be converted between laptop format (see the picture on the right) and tablet form. It can do mesh networking, even when the device is off.
It’s pretty easy to imagine a few of these spread around a village, or in a school. It’s an impressive project.