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."

Comments

STOP HELPING THEM!

[Colin Smith]

Start trading with them.

Buy those shoes, suits, created with "slave wages", buy African corn, sugar, peanuts, tomatoes and apples.

That's how to lift people out of poverty.

We've been waging economic war with developing and third world countries for several generations now. It's only just starting to end. You can't buy African agricultural products (about all they can produce) because of the subsidies we give our own farming sectors to produce products at below market value.

The OLPC? Frankly it's irrelevant. What 3rd world countries need is first infrastructure and education. The OLPC isn't a particularly good way to educate people and there isn't enough infrastructure to make real use of it. The money spent on producing it would be better spent persuading American and European politicians to remove agricultural subsidies.

Re:STOP HELPING THEM!

[Antique Geekmeister]

OLPC is a very useful tool to education: being able to Google or Wikipedia for farming information, getting legal information and market information for poor farmers threatened by their landlords or lied to about crop prices, and simply getting detailed weather information locally are all amazingly useful. OLPC is about communications as much as any other grand purpose. And being able to shop around for better selling prices for their goods, or buying prices for food, fuel, and fertilizer may easily pay for the laptop within a year for a poor family.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

OLPC is a very useful tool to education: being able to Google or Wikipedia for farming information, getting legal information and market information for poor farmers threatened by their landlords or lied to about crop prices, and simply getting detailed weather information locally are all amazingly useful. OLPC is about communications as much as any other grand purpose. And being able to shop around for better selling prices for their goods, or buying prices for food, fuel, and fertilizer may easily pay for the laptop within a year for a poor family.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they can balance their checkbook, take classes on line, their lives will turn around in just a year, their land become "The Land of Milk and Honey" and they'll become successful members of the world community.

What WILL happen is that they'll get these machines, and if they're not stolen first, those very poor people will sell them for what they really need. This program is just a pipe dream created by a bunch of clueless sanctimonious Westerners who think that technology is the cure for everything.

You wait and see.

And when it does fail, it will blamed on the administrators of the program - not the fact that it's a dumb idea.

I also hope that I'm completely full of shit and this is raving success!