Posts Tagged ‘OLPC’

Intel pulled the plug from OLPC

January 7th, 2008 Gadgets No Comments
Just a few days ago when OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen announced her departure, optimists were still hopeful that Nicholas Negroponte will turn the things around in no time; after all it all is for a good cause. But just a few days before mass production begin when Intel announced it’s puling the plug on its dealings with Nicholas Negroponte’s brainchild’ things are not looking good at all for OLPC. When Intel joined OLPC’s educational programme last July, the aim was to combine two major attempts at providing low-cost laptops for the sake of delivering global progress. Intel left the partnership end of last week, giving reasons of “impossible to reconcile” differences between the organisations, as well as accusing OLPC of demanding that Intel end its supply of the Classmate PC, which is part of Intel’s World Ahead programme. Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC chairman, said   Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while simultaneously asking us to work on a joint statement with them. Intel had not responded to OLPC’s accusations at the time of going to press. Or maybe they have nothing left to say! OLPC said the differences between the two organisations were that  …
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The OLPC future cloudy?

January 3rd, 2008 Gadgets No Comments
The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) project seems to encounter another major setback, as its CTO Mary Lou Jepsen is stepping down to pursue a commercial project based on OLPC technologies. Since the day one this project has proved difficult to get off the ground. Now sudden departure of CTO, might be the end of the Give One Get One scheme which sold the laptop commercially to users in the US. According to OLPC they were very successful in “Give One Get One scheme”, though no independent data available to support this claim. Though now many children have access to the OLPC XO laptops but the success has been modest when compared to the original vision. Since Nov, 2007 OLPC goes on Mass Production of XO laptop, you may consider Lou Jepsen contribution come to an end, but many observer thinks it does raise question marks about the long-term design evolution of the laptop. There may not be such a good future for OLPC in Brazil as in the Brazil “auction”, factors like local production and import taxes are more significant than the educational questions. Things are not being compared on a like-for-like or lifetime usage basis. Many consider OLPC…
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Microsoft’s eager to power OLPC laptops

October 28th, 2007 Gadgets, Software 2 Comments
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the Delaware, USA based, non-profit organization, created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, set up to oversee The Children’s Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 "$100 laptop". Both the project and the organization were announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005. It has attracted news whirl, since its birth, once again it’s in limelight reason-Microsoft. Microsoft Corp. this week said that it is working on a version of Windows XP operating system compatible with laptops from OLPC. The company said that Windows XP may work already on the current XO model, which was once supposed to sell for $100; obviously they are targeting future versions of the notebook as well. Microsoft’s appearance certainly contradicting the OLPC policy described here, which says- XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms…… We are using open-document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole expresses uncertainty on this during an interview on Thursday.(Source Reuters) We’re spending a nontrivial amount of money on it … We…
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