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A Dream Job - CTO of the OLPC Project
weibullguy dropped us a link from the IEEE's site. They've voted the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project as a 'Dream Job 2007'. Held by Mary Lou Jepsen, a former CTO for Intel, the position entails world travel, speaking with heads of state, and dealing endlessly with the technological challenges of a project designed to change the world. In the article, she relates some of the details of her first task on the job - redesigning the OLPC's display. "According to Jepsen, the display her team eventually marshaled into existence requires, depending on the mode, only between 2 percent and 14 percent of a typical laptop display's power consumption. ... To save watts, the display can switch between color with the backlight on, in low light, and black-and-white with the backlight off, in sunlight. OLPC's engineers trimmed battery usage further by, among other things, adding memory to the timing-controller chip, which decides how often a display refreshes. That trick enables the display to update itself continually without using the CPU if nothing changes on the screen."
Maybe its because they need an effective CEO.
I've been following this project for a while (meta-blog here. Aside from the innovative hardware (especially with the screen and mesh network), I've been intrigued with the bizarre GUI, called Sugar (review of HIG here. It's a freaky interface that goes way beyond the traditional desktop metaphor where you run "applications" and save things in "files".
Best of all, soon kids in 3rd world countries will be able to annoy the crap out of their parents with funky casio beats.
>In fact, Africa has probably received more charity than China or India and is doing much worse than those countries.
Exactly my point. If the third world countries knew what had to be done, they wouldn't be third world countries anymore. Africa is a perfect example- they get millions, even billions in "aid" and the government officials just end up buying nice cars and planes with the money. Africa doesn't need money or food, it needs serious investment in its infrastructure and education system. It needs economic development, and that is something the Africans can't provide. In South Africa, the unemployment rate is hovering around 40%. During the Great Depression, an American unemployment rate of 25% - almost half of South Africa - was a global crisis.
Lookie here
"In other developing countries, legions of unskilled workers have kept down labor costs. But South Africa's leaders, vowing not to let their nation become the West's sweatshop, heeded the demands of politically powerful labor unions for new protections and benefits. According to a study conducted in 2000 for the government's finance department, South Africa's wages are five times higher than Indonesia's, even though its workers are only twice as productive.
To the great detriment of its people, South Africa's leaders have been successful. South Africa is not the West's sweatshop."
Third world leaders do not know what needs to be done. The knowledge, the 2 centuries of economics research, exists in the west. A country that has never before had a thriving economy can't be expected to suddenly spawn one.
I'm a member of IEEE, so I get the magazine. Here are the rest of the dream jobs (I'll leave their names out):
Electric Detective- basically an electric/electronic CSI
Computerized Paleeontology- Uses neat equipment to help find fossils (he likes dinosaurs)
Bird watcher? - tracks birds with cellphone tech (he likes birds)
Volcano wathcer- installs and maintains volcano sensors on the Soufriere volcano (his hometown)
Lap top girl
Laser light show- designs and produces laser light shows. Also holds laser safety programs.
Electric sport cars- designs, builds, and races high speed electric cars (up to 130 km/hr with 1 G acceleration)
Chess master- built what is considered the best computer chess program (he likes chess)
AI robot designer- makes AI robots
Wireless wildman- installs wireless networks in remote places, such as the Napaski Nation (about 1100 miles south of the arctic circle in Canada) - says he likes to fish
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
They actually added a Secure Digital port for Windows. This is yet another hole that allows water and dust to get into the laptop while reducing the strength of the case. It also costs money. The "Secure" part of Secure Digital is of course DRM, which is also offensive.
Microsoft could have been easily locked out by choosing a big-endian CPU. At best, a stripped down version of the bare OS might be made to run in big-endian mode. (the Xbox360 may be so, or perhaps Microsoft runs PowerPC in little-endian mode) None of the normal apps are tolerant of big-endian mode, especially when exchanging file formats and Windows-specific network protocols with the rest of the world.
We'll be seeing every one of these laptops with a copy of Windows, with Microsoft once again benefiting from the network affects of unauthorized copying.
Just so you know, China, for one, is not doing a hell of a lot better than South Africa right now.
t s/dp/1586483587
Chinese cities are going gangbusters, and if you are lucky enough to live in one, your standard of living has gone up exponentially. The Chinese countryside, on the other hand, is still suffering in terrible poverty, comparable to anything in the third world. China essentially has an existing apartheid system, where peaseants do not have the right to move into the city, and often suffer under a tax burden many times greater than their city relatives. (And this is ignoring actual ethnic discrimination in China, which is rife against the "minorites")
Check out the book- http://www.amazon.com/Will-Boat-Sink-Water-Peasan
In the countryside, AIDS and Hepatitis are rife in some areas, and basic healthcare is poor or nonexistant. China is still a largely rurual society, although the cities have been filling up with migrants who have few or no rights when they arrive. Their population, because of the 1-child policy, is aging rapidly, and there are serious concerns about the political instability caused by the rich/poor city/country divide.
China has serous 3rd world problems, hinding behind some glitzy first-world cities.