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It’s easy to take education for granted, especially when you consider that every child in the UK has access to a computer, whether it’s at home or at school. But what most people forget is that 1 billion children in the developing world have little access to education, and no access to computers, which is where a burgeoning non-profit organisation called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) comes in.

Nigerian school children get their hands on the XO and immediately start learning how to use it.

The organisation hit the headlines in 2007 when it developed a low cost laptop called the XO, which was designed to be bought cheaply by governments of developing countries and distributed among school children. The XO was originally dubbed the $100 laptop, and although three years on it still hasn’t achieved its target price, it has been purchased by 21 developing countries and distributed to 1,284,500 children across the world. However, while the organisation has helped so many children around the world, it has courted controversy, created rifts with the world’s biggest technology companies, and spearheaded the biggest consumer technology trend in the last decade.

One Laptop per Child was the realisation of an altruistic dream by a MIT director and professor Nicholas Negroponte. In 2005 he unveiled his plan to see a laptop given to every child in the developing world, to aid their education, and offer them the similar advantages in the digital age as children in the developed world. The idea was based on the creation of something completely unique: A laptop which was durable enough to withstand the stresses and strains of life in a developing world, cope with the challenges of intermittent power and internet availability, and cost just $100.

The design of the XO PC was outstanding, and should be regarded as a feat of computer engineering. Against the back drop of the prices of technology in 2005, before low cost and low power components were prevalent, Negroponte designed a laptop with a 433MHz processor, 256MB RAM, a 7.5” LCD display and wireless networking. This may not sound impressive, but its base cost of £199 was unheard of at the time, it had enough power to drive its bespoke Linux operating system dubbed Sugar, it could function as a laptop, ebook reader, had a screen which was clearly visible outside in direct sunlight, had 12 hours of battery life and was completely shock-proof, waterproof and dust-proof.

While the XO preceded the market in terms of design, its biggest challenges were to overcome the rigours of a life in the hands of children in developing countries. Availability and reliance on power was a problem for Negroponte, and the XO could not succeed if it was too power hungry. They also had to iron out the biggest failing point on consumer laptops: Hard disc crashes. The XO introduced flash drives, which eliminated the mechanical wear and tear of traditional spinning disc drives. What’s more, the XO featured a revolutionary new screen, which used a dynamic LED backlight, which reduced operating wattage down to 3W under normal conditions. This put battery life at 12 hours, far beyond that of normal consumer laptops, and made the XO a force to be reckoned with.

A new kind of PC

The XO laptop caused such a stir, that it’s credited with spearheading the resulting netbook craze, which is still the only PC sub-market which is growing. Once OLPC had mastered the low power components, screen and size, it started selling them in the US. They retailed the laptop as part of the Give One Get One campaign, where a US consumer would purchas a laptop for $400, and donate one to a child in a developing country at the same time. It’s this that Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News, an independent community of OLPC supporters, believes caught the eye of companies such as Asus and Acer.

The XO PC is waterproof and dustproof, making it ideal for children in the developing world.

“The real threat of OLPC introducing a “$100 laptop” was enough to spur technology companies into action. And they had to act fast. OLPC sold 160,000 XO laptops at $400 for two- and you didn’t even get both. That had Asus rightly excited when they launched the EeePC line to amazing success,” he said.

Once ASUS made a commercial success of their EeePC, the whole market had to catch up, and within six months, every laptop manufacturer was shipping its own netbook version. In 2009 there were 33.3 million netbooks sold globally, and the sector achieved a 72% growth in sales, compared to a 13% decline in amount of notebooks sold. If its supporters are correct, One Laptop per Child caused one of the biggest technology sensations of the decade.

“The creation of the netbook market is largely, and appropriately credited to OLPC,” says Ed McNierney, Chief Technical Officer of OLPC. “We wouldn’t have $300 netbooks in the consumer market if that push from OLPC hadn’t happened.
Consumer product companies in the technology world are not known, in general, for their risk-taking behaviour,” he told PC Plus.

When asked for a comment, an ASUS spokesman told PC Plus that the XO had no bearing or effect on the creation of the EeePC 701 which launched in 2008, and that the company would have come to market with a similar product even if the XO hadn’t been invented.

Competition

It’s not often that a non-profit organisation courts competition and controversy, but the technology industry can be an unpredictable world, and it wasn’t long before OLPC found itself embroiled in a war of words with Intel. The world’s biggest chip maker had seen the market potential of the developing world and built its own low cost laptop, the Classmate PC, soon after the announcement of the OLPC XO- a move which incensed Negroponte. He called Intel ‘predatory’ in a lecture at MIT, accused the company of “hurting the [OLPC] mission” on the CBS news show 60 minutes, back in 2007. If this wasn’t enough, Negroponte then accused Intel of selling its Classmate PC to the same governments he was trying to persuade to take up orders of the XO, but “dumping” them at a loss making sum, scuppering his project.

Children in Nigeria recieve a traditional lesson from their teacher, but use the OLPC XO laptop to support their learning.

In the face of widespread criticism, Intel joined forces with OLPC in December 2007, in an uneasy alliance, which caused public disconcertion from AMD, who was a founding partner of the OLPC project. While the Intel – OLPC partnership promised a new beginning, the reality was very different. Less than six months later Negroponte dropped Intel representatives from OLPC’s board of directors, demanding that Intel dumped its Classmate project if the two companies continued to work together. With the money Intel has invested in its own project it was never going to can the Classmate PC project, and the relationship ended.

Since 2007, both laptops have seen their share of success and failure, with Intel shipping 1 million Classmate PCs to Venezuela and 150,000 to Libya. OLPC has saturated Uruguay and Peru with approximately 1 million XO laptops, as well as completing smaller orders from Colombia, Rwanda and Mexico. Whether Intel’s Classmate PC project hurt the OLPC effort is still the subject of debate, but Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News, an independent community of OLPC supporters, doesn’t think so. He believes that the enthusiasm created by the XO and Classmate PC made Negroponte’s dream a reality: “I’ve heard from Intel insiders that the XO laptop moved the netbook revolution forward by a few years. Intel would’ve come out with a Classmate-like device, but not as soon as they had to with OLPC’s pressure. For this, both organizations should be thankful because netbooks are the only bright spot in the laptop business,” he told PC Plus.

However, the bright spot of technology might not look so good for OLPC. It’s not been able to get its cost down to the desired $100, and orders have been far from overwhelming. What’s more, the consumer market has caught up, and it’s possible to buy standard netbooks at cost as cheaply as an XO. While they’re not built as ruggedly with the developing world in mind, they do feature fully functional operating systems, such as Windows, which some say would better prepare children for a connected future.

An ‘irresponsible strategy”

Despite its rocky road to success, OLPC still has a long way to go before it can claim any kind of success. Its intention to deliver PCs into the hands of the world’s poorest children is admirable, but experts have called its methods in question, warning that the charity risks wasting the hard work and achievements by equipping communities with laptops and then leaving them to work out how to use them for themselves- a criticism which Walter de Brouwer, European CEO of One Laptop per Child flatly rejects. “The charge is false,” he told PC Plus in an exclusive interview. “Typically, teachers and schools receive a two-week introduction not only to the machine and its technical features and operation, but more critically on how to integrate it into the learning experiences,” he said. De Brouwer continued: “OLPC works with the country to develop a team that works with the schools. The team supports the schools, technically and pedagogically. This team also works to develop capacity at the schools and locally in the communities.”

In the UK schools require entire departments to keep their networks and PCs in running order, and the use of IT in classrooms as a key part of teacher’s training. Wayan Vota, an outspoken supporter of the OLPC project, has questioned the level of support provided by OLPC called their deployment strategy “irresponsible.”

“OLPC has always maintained distance from actual implementation, claiming it was the country’s responsibility to integrate XO laptop into their educational system. That might work for Uruguay, a stable, advanced country. But it’s irresponsible in lesser developed countries. OLPC has the responsibility to educate countries on what they are buying – an XO laptop should be one small part of a whole educational system change,” he said. “Just handing off the XO laptop, like it’s a self-installing app, leads to Ethiopian teachers banning them from classrooms as a plague on education.”

Last year, teachers and parents in Ethiopia criticised the deployment of the XO, claiming that it was a distracting toy for the children, and could not be a worthwhile tool in their education system built around memorising from a blackBoard and then passing the national test. Without teacher training to implement the laptops, the XO couldn’t fulfil its function. While self-learning is an important part of the XO’s purpose, it’s clear that there’s a serious risk that the laptops will either not be used effectively, or fall into disrepair.

One has to admire what Negroponte and OLPC has achieved in the last three years, battling adversity which would have overcome many other organisations. OLPC claims that attendance in schools improves with the introduction of the XO. OLPC is currently working on a new version of its laptop, the XO-1.5, which it hopes to start deploying later this year, and has released concepts of a $75 tablet PC which it aims to make a reality by 2012. No-one can argue that getting an internet connected laptop into the hands of children in the developing world is essential for those countries to grow and prosper. However, unless OLPC ask difficult questions of the XO’s recipients, it risks wasting an opportunity to really make a difference.

Concept of success

No-one can accuse Negroponte of not being ambitious and if his mission to put an internet connected PC into the hands of every child in the developing world wasn’t challenging enough, he wants to build a paper thin touchscreen tablet PC which will retail at under $100. This concept design is the OLPC XO-3 (pictured) and is the latest dream of OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte. It’s to be based on the XO 1.75 spec, which will feature an ARM mobile processor, which will provide twice the speed of the XO-1 and operate at 25% of the power. However, the main difference is the form. Negroponte wants to move away from a standard laptop form, and go for a purely touchscreen device.

A vision of the future: Negroponte wants to launch a handheld tablet similar to this concept, costing less than $100, in 2012.

Whether or not the XO-3 can actually be achieved is another matter. Producing something similar to the iPad in form, in just two years and dropping the cost to under $100 seems ludicrous, and whether such a device could power an OS capable of supporting a child’s education is another matter. What’s more, whether this form factor is suited to education is another matter. It seems that Negroponte has learned a few things about the nature of the technology industry, in the last three years promoting the XO. While the threat of releasing a sub-$100 netbook spurred the rest of the industry to react is a seismic way, he’s hoping that the design of a low-cost tablet could have the same effect. He told Forbes: “We don’t necessarily need to build it, we just need to threaten to build it.”

If OLPC can use the industry to its advantage this time, rather than do all the leg work while the consumer market reaps the benefits, then the dream of getting tablet PCs into developing countries could become a reality.

This model was created by Andrew Comb. It took six years to model in Lightwave 3D, and has a total of nine million polygons.

Once upon a time, a handful of pixels madeth the space invader. Graphics were iconic, not representative: a picture on the box or manual showed you what it was meant to look like, and your mind filled in the necessary gaps. Nobody could have predicted that in just 20 years, we’d be immersing ourselves in realistic living cities, flying over gorgeous tropical islands and going head-to-head with astoundingly rendered characters – and not even being particularly impressed. But in years to come, modern games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Crysis will look just as dated as the classics we remember from the days of yore. In fact, they’ll probably look more so: while the simplicity of a retro game’s look has a certain charm to it, old 3D titles tend to flat-out look old. Try almost any hit game of the mid-to-late ’90s for proof of that.

3D is about more than just pretty graphics. Done right, it makes gameworlds come alive. A 2D sprite can only do what it’s been drawn to do, while a 3D character has a complete endoskeleton and can respond naturally (at least in theory) to anything that happens – the classic example being ‘ragdolls’, where a fallen enemy doesn’t simply slump to the ground in a canned animation, but tumbles off the railing and lands with one arm draped over a step.

You can create worlds rather than merely levels, unlocking the player’s ability to truly explore and experience the world as the character would. You can build simulations ready to be poked and prodded, abused and enjoyed.

It’s phenomenally powerful, to the point that many nominally 2D games are now really 3D ones viewed from a locked perspective, so that they can better use the possibilities of animation, physics and art assets. Why render hundreds of frames of animation you may not be happy with when you can make a model and keep tweaking it until it’s perfect? You may lose some of the old-school charm, but you gain far more.

Dawn of a dimension

The first big 3D success was Battlezone, a tank game released in 1980 that used vector graphics to create its work, much like Asteroids. While a simple game by modern standards, it was fiendishly complex for such an early example, offering the ability to go anywhere in an (admittedly featureless) world, hide from attacks and fight enemies.

Battlezone was thought to be so realistic that the US Army used it to train tank gunners.

Not impressive enough? In 1987, the first Freescape game, Driller, hit the shelves. It offered a full 3D world on platforms as basic as the Spectrum, and was an actual game rather than just a tech demo. Next to that, it didn’t matter that it was ugly, the frame-rate was abysmal and the game itself wasn’t actually much fun – it got lots of attention.

The Freescape engine in its various forms was used in several famous releases, including Castle Master and its sequel, and the all-out 3D Construction Kit. Legend has it that someone somewhere once made something other than a surreal, unplayable mess in this, but we never saw it. Freescape also made it onto TV, in the form of the absolutely atrocious Craig Charles vehicle Cyberzone, one of the most toe-curling attempts at creating a games-related TV show ever. Thankfully, all that remains of it is a single YouTube clip – and that’s painful enough. Most of the early 3D games stuck to simpler technologies. These days, we think of 3D as free-roaming, real-time engines, but back in the day, simply getting a game to look 3D was impressive. As early as 1981, games were achieving this feat – 3D Monster Maze was terrifying a generation with its slowly updating screens and roaming T-Rex, and the first Ultima game was offering a very advanced hybrid of block-by-block movement 3D graphics for its dark dungeons alongside a top-
down 2D overworld for exploration.

Interestingly, while most developers kept pushing further towards 3D, Ultima ended up pulling back, switching entirely to a top-down sprite-based system for the series’ glory days. The 3D element later developed into its own spin-off – the Ultima Underworld games – before returning for the series’ sadly disappointing final outing – the buggy, system-murdering Ultima IX: Ascension.

Faking it

The problem has always been the same: the potential of 3D fights with the limitations of current systems, whether it’s simply displaying the graphics in the first place or making them look as good as other art styles. Going back to an early ’90s 3D game now is almost painful. Flat faces, non-moving lips during conversations, stick-figure character models, smeary textures and appalling animation… the list of problems goes on. Some games got past this, sometimes bizarrely – most obviously Core Design’s legendary heroine Lara Croft, who managed to become an international sex symbol despite looking like a pointy-chested Pinocchio. Most survived simply because playing a 3D game felt futuristic, even if the lack of polygons our PCs could push out meant that 2D games were usually much more detailed.

For much of 3D’s history, the trick has been getting the effect of the third dimension without having to do it for real. The early Wing Commander games gave the illusion that you were flying through 3D space, but really they were just scaling sprites up and down. In first-person shooters, it quickly became clear that walls were easy thanks to their incredibly simple geometry, but snarling hellbeasts dripping blood from their fangs were asking a bit too much. So developers compromised. The worlds themselves were made in 3D, initially just as mazes. Then, as texturing became more advanced, more realistic-looking areas were created, like those in Catacomb 3D.

Interestingly, the state of the art varied dramatically across genres. Shooters had to be fast and fluid, so they were kept simple. In the case of early games like Core Design’s Corporation, things were stripped down so much that the engine didn’t even bother with textures. Id’s first breakout hit – Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 – had textures to depict the inside of its supposed Nazi castle stronghold, but all the maps were completely flat and the interaction was limited to just opening doors and shooting enemies. Ultima Underworld, which came out in the same year, had sloped surfaces, advanced lighting effects, dialogue, puzzles, magic systems, physics, 3D objects, a real plot, the ability to look up and down instead of having your view locked straight ahead and much more.

Ultima Underworld could afford to push these limits because as a role-playing game, it was inherently slower than a shooter, and the audience was more willing to accept the necessary limitations, like the small viewing window. It didn’t hurt that while publisher Origin’s official motto was ‘We Create Worlds’, its unofficial credo was ‘Your PC Will Cry’. It never did worry about system requirements…

Two and a half dimensions

For performance and sales reasons, most games were stuck in what was dubbed 2.5D until the launch of Quake in 1996. Quake wasn’t the first genuinely full-3D shooter in the modern style, but it was the one that made 2.5D officially obsolete. These faux 3D or 2.5D games were flat maps, where areas could be raised and lowered (and in later games like Duke Nukem 3D, sloped), but you couldn’t have one room on top of another. Some games pretended otherwise, but it was generally a trick – the player would be silently teleported as they crossed the room’s threshold. Descent provided a full 3D world made up of polygons in 1995, but only a basic one – it was a series of sprawling mineshafts. The Star Wars game Dark Forces offered rooms above rooms, but otherwise stuck to the standard technologies on display in any other shooter of its era, including sprites.

First-person shooter bosses like this were unheard of before Quake was released in 1996. Now, they’re standard issue.

Sprites were a growing problem. By the mid ’90s, level design was getting more and more impressive. By modern standards, the opening cinema level in Duke Nukem Forever is empty and unconvincing, but to an audience used to bland military base corridors and castles, the realism was incredible.

Almost all these games were able to do this because they saved their 3D for the world. Actual characters were pre-drawn 2D images, pasted in to the game. Not only did they increasingly look weak, not part of the scenery and incredibly blocky up-close, but they also didn’t fit. Games could scale sprites to deal with the player getting closer to and further away from them, but when they started offering the ability to look up and down (first made popular with Heretic, a 1994 fantasy game) the effect showed its limits, with sprites shearing and increasingly looking like the cardboard cutouts they were.

A little voodoo magic

Games had to get more advanced, but the performance wasn’t there. Quake brought full-3D worlds and enemies to the field in 1996, but at the cost of visuals. Technically, they were better, and the improvement in animation was stunning – an early sequence where a snarling Fiend leaps out of a door to attack the player directly is one of many gamers’ fondest memories, to say nothing of the first episode’s room-
sized, lava-throwing monster Cthon. But the world was still drab, ugly and simplistic, with enemies that looked like they’d been knocked into shape with a sledgehammer and textures that would have lowered the tone in a morgue. Like all graphics technology, this quickly improved over the next few years, but it was increasingly obvious that simply throwing more CPU power at games wasn’t going to cut it.

Not alone, anyway

Most people didn’t really see the need for dedicated video cards at first because, to put it bluntly, there wasn’t much of one. Games increasingly offered a high-end mode that offered a higher resolution and additional effects without a specific need for extra hardware – bar a hefty processor. This high-end mode slowly became the standard experience, yet it was a long time before video cards became mandatory for playing PC games. Even technical showpieces like the original Unreal would run in so-called ‘software mode’. There wasn’t one big game that marked the transition, more a slow giving into inevitability.

Dedicated 3D cards came into their own around 1997, with several competing, mutually incompatible brands fighting it out for dominance. By far the most successful was 3DFX with its Voodoo cards. Even now, with built-in low-end 3D a standard on motherboards, a separate 3D card is mandatory for most games. On the plus side, the dominance of DirectX means that you don’t need to worry too much about which card to buy.

Individually, the abilities offered by 3D cards don’t sound too exciting. In the late ’90s, the core functions were transformation, clipping and lighting – in short, getting the card to work out where items in the world were and how they should be lit. The next big advance was the addition of shaders. Shaders are additional calculations thrown into the rendering pipeline that work on individual pixels, vertices and pieces of geometry to add effects and change the final image. Examples include working out appropriate shadows, making a flag flutter or adding bump mapping (a texture that gives the illusion of raised and lowered areas on an object without the need to add polygons). More advanced shaders include motion blur and bloom effects, soft shadows, depth of field and volumetric lighting.

The new bottlenecks

With the technology burden eased (or at least partly passed onto the card manufacturers), developers could focus on making the most of what they had. Valve largely pioneered skeletal-based characters rather than keyframe-by-keyframe animated enemies in Half-Life, and Ritual went out of its way to create interactive elements such as hackable computers in the real-
world environments of Half-Life’s closest rival of the time, Sin. Ragdolls spread to every new game until the games that didn’t offer them felt stodgy and ancient in comparison. Most importantly, the new realism of these games finally let developers sink their teeth into genres that they’d never have been able to do as traditional corridor shooters. Grand Theft Auto III gave us a living city. A million games brought the horrors of World War II to life in glorious cinematic style.

Realistic character and facial animation is a surprisingly recent addition to gaming.

Problem solved? No, just replaced. Now the issue became one of creating all this in the first place. A simple maze-based 3D shooter could be churned out in under a year by a competent team, but building cities, battlefields and other real-world elements requires an immense number of assets. Games are much shorter than they used to be, not because they’re more complicated – in most cases, the features are more advanced but the thinking is more conservative – because of the amount of content required, and the cost of making it. There are shortcuts for some things, like the Speedtree libraries for procedurally generating a forest in a hurry (used in, among many others, Grand Theft Auto IV, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3), but in general, if a developer wants something, that developer has to make it himself.

Crysis 2 is the current state of the art: explore New York in the wake of an alien invasion.

Technology itself has also reached a plateau, not because there’s nothing more to do – nobody thinks that – but because right now, the big money is on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Both are relatively old machines, but that doesn’t matter. PC ports often allow for higher resolutions and sometimes let you switch on better graphics (Metro 2033 looks much better for instance, as will Crysis 2 when it lands) but it’s usually a token gesture. To put the graphical difference into context, many PlayStation 3 games don’t even use anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges of their polygons, and games on both platforms typically render at a lower resolution than the high-def numbers you’d expect from the systems’ marketing.

Outsourcing Healthcare Claims Processing By: dataservices

There was a time when doctors in the healthcare system felt at sea while applying for healthcare claims. Neither did they know the right procedure nor had the right technical knowledge of processing the claims. They considered this whole procedure an extra burden that hampered their professional responsibilities. Unfortunately there was no escape from this as the entire process was meant to help them get reimbursed for their medical costs. Thanks to outsourcing, this situation has changed for the better. Now a doctor can give his or her full attention on treating a patient without bothering about the claims processing. There are various companies and people out there who know how to handle the technical part of the healthcare claims processing or the medical claims processing. They will render their services to doctors and other healthcare institutes by charging a particular sum of money in lieu of their professional expertise.

This facility to outsource the healthcare claims process has helped the doctors and the medical field in many ways. The doctors are now a relaxed lot. They do not have to read out technical documents any more. These providers of claims processing services have different ways to make sure that your claims do not get rejected. These organizations have experienced people who know how to proceed with the job and get it completed in quick time.

Apart from outsourcing the whole job, interested doctors can also seek the help of these organizations to provide information on the right and suitable procedures. The organizations will suggest the exact method that will ensure a successful claim.

Prior to the availability of outsourcing, many doctors had to put up with too many rejections. Now, outsourcing companies make sure that all the formalities are met while submitting such claims. Experts and specialists who have been working on medical data entry and other related jobs handle these claims. Since these people have the adequate insight into the rules and regulations for processing the claims, seldom do they become unsuccessful.

Companies like Rely Services are known for their efficient and speedy handling of claims processing. If you too do not want to wait for ages to see your claims getting addressed, you can hire Rely Services.

Outsourcing healthcare claims processing have made the whole affair much less expensive for the doctors and the medical fraternity. The labor available in other parts of the world is much cheaper but is equally good in terms of quality of the delivered job.

So, if you have been apprehensive of outsourcing your healthcare claims processing, it’s time to bid adieu to such worries and reap the benefits of claim processing services offered by such companies.

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