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

Why didn't they oh I don't know

[antifoidulus]

actually choose someone who came from one of these countries? Maybe someone who actually has firsthand knowledge of what is really needed as opposed to someone who probably never had to go hungry a day in her life. Meh, in my opinion this is just another example of the west's hubris, ie"we know what is best for you and will tell you what is best for you instead of letting you decide". It's failed before and will probably fail again.