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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."
CTO stands for "Chief Technical Officer" as opposed to "Chief ToThePlaceAndFindOutWhatTheyReallyNeed Officer". The project starts with the (possibly wrong, but there's only one way to find out for sure) axiom that a laptop will be useful for these people. Perhaps technical qualifications in building laptops are more important to the CTOs position than precise knowledge of one particular area where they would be used. Note, that not only could you not have the technical knowledge if you spent your time in the places where the product would be delivered, you wouldn't even be able to tell about the special needs of the other places.
I'm personally not sure about whether OLPC is going to be a success, but the desperate knocking and bad advice the project gets seems to suggest to me that some really big commercial interests are deeply afraid of this. I wonder why? Afraid to lose your cheap labour? Afraid that it will drive the success of free software? Afraid the poor will rise up? What is it? To me it seems like a fairly innocent technology experiment which will probably be a partial success but won't live up to the wild dreams of it's originators. It's probably going to cost a bit and give an economic return which is a little bit more than the investment. Who cares? Why not leave it alone?
Maybe its because they need an effective CEO.
They had better distribute 10s of thousands at a time...otherwise they'll be theft targets. Amsterdam had to do same thing with their yellow bikes.
Yea, because third world countries know exactly what needs to be done, right?
India and China certainly did. Their economies have been sustaining growth rates around 10%(and sometimes exceeding it in the case of China) for at least the past decade. That is an amazing growth rate, something the west hasn't seen in a long time. And how did they achieve this? It certainly because some white guy at MIT decided that he knew what was best for them. It wasn't philanthropy at all, it was greed, pure and simple. They started to privatize businesses and now more people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years than probably ever before in recorded human history, and greed helped them, not charity.
In fact, Africa has probably received more charity than China or India and is doing much worse than those countries. There are a lot of other factors involved of course, but it shows that charity isn't some magic bullet that can solve all of societies ills. If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Anything else does more harm than good.
Monstar L
I'm not to sure the OLPC falls squarly under philanthropy or charity. I mean sure they are doing a good thing, but they are still going to charge the countries for the technology. It's not like we are giving them food. Each country can choose or choose not to take the OLPC offer. India didn't take it. I really see your point as irrelevant because we arn't pushing any thing at a 3rd world country. This is a take it or leave it. AND they have to pay for it. Sure there may be no hard monetary profit in doing this, but I want you to take a look at the technology that's going into the OLPC. There is a lot of profit in aplying those technologies to a more developed market.
Money is the root of all evil?
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.
Deleted
>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.
If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Every developed country in the world did it at the expense of other countries, which were invaded, pillaged, plundered for slaves, or enslaved as vassal states. This is still going on and probably always will till we have a world government/dictatorship. The idea that history has ended and the world has seen the capitalist light belongs in the 1990s, and should have died by now.
The rise of India could perhaps be attributed to privatised business, though frankly I doubt it, it's not suddenly transformed into a free-market haven because of cancelling some external tarrifs, though Dr Singh may be trying to pass reforms and privatise some industries, that'll take a while. It's probably more to do with promotion of outsourcing in western countries and the move of a lot of manufacturing and now even services over to India/China in the 80s/90s. China could possibly conform better with your argument, though again their strong position has a lot to do with govt. intervention (the yuan being pegged for a start, and subsidies/tax breaks for development zones, plus the suppression of workers rights).
Africa doesn't receive much charity - I suspect the total annual figure is far less than the outlay on debt servicing - the external debt is around $300 billion for Africa in total. We definitely make more from them in arms sales (£1 billion in 2004 from the UK alone) than we've ever given in charity and I suspect the arms sales have a more dramatic deleterious effect. The colonial legacy and the wars which came after are the cause of their current problems, not charity.
Now of course charity doesn't necessarily solve all ills and can be downright damaging, especially given the cynical, pernicious way state aid is given nowadays, and enterprise can be useful, but to claim some sort of free trade enlightenment has swept the world is nonsense. Hell, the US is a very successful state, and many industries are heavily supported by import tarrifs and subsidies - steel, aerospace and agriculture among them. Their success has been in persuading others link India to lower their barriers for things like agriculture at the same time as remaining protectionist.
However every successful society makes up their own myths to explain their success and the otherwise inexplicable failure of others.
Going back to the OLPC project, it's not strictly a charity anyway - they're talking about selling these things to governments to make money so they can make more laptops. Kids will make of these laptops what they wish, but without them it'd take a lot longer for IT to take off in developing countries. I think it's an enlightened idea, and will hasten the development of global thinking and a truly global market - in that sense you should welcome it. Perhaps when many more people in Brazil or elsewhere get laptops, we'll see an influx of people more informed about other countries on these boards - frankly it can do nothing but good as at the moment they're dominated by westerners and the western point of view.
And it's all open source, including the BIOS. The LinuxBIOS and OpenBIOS are very, very useful tools that easily outperform the commercial versions: children's laptops booting up in seconds are going to make the owners of more expensive, "feature-laden" laptops quite jealous.
The OLPC has a LinuxBIOS but it would be able to run Windows as well (and it probably will [1]). If the Linux community was really pushing Linux to gain market share wouldn't you expect a dramatic increase in activity on edu.kde.org by now?
There would also be some larger development projects to be done. (How about some educational games like Genius - Task Force Biologie, Chemicus II - die versunkene Stadt, Mathica for the OLPC, using Wikipedia articles as the knowledge part of the game?)
Of course it probably doesn't matter much if Microsoft offers a more or less free copy of Windows for the OLPC or Linux is used as the OS.
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!
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.
Your comments, and other like it, tread dangerously close to 'blaming the victim' in a rape case.
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.