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Nigerian Company Sues OLPC
d0ida writes on the continuing troubles at the OLPC Association. Adding to the recent difficulties — the BBC has picked up the litany — a US-based, Nigerian-owned company has now filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against OLPC. Lagos Analysis Corp. claims that OLPC "made unauthorized use of LANCOR's multilingual keyboard technology invention in XO laptops." The suit was filed in Lagos.
Like the OLPC needs more road blocks.
Crush them. no quater can be given to these people
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Patents. What will they think of next?
... could just ignore Nigerian law and be just fine. After all, it's not like many Nigerians obey anyone else's laws (much less their own).
to make 419 scam jokes, must resist...
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
... for sending SPAM from the OLPC
Maybe Nigeria can become known as a country of greedy patent trolls instead of just a country of internet scammers. As if there's any practical difference.
OLPC team -- don't get discouraged. As they say, if you're receiving flak, you must be over the target.
I've never understood why they are given in most cases.
I can understand halting the sales of a product when you have a competing product, like amazon and all the VoIP sueing.
But what do they gain when they are a patent troll? If they going to be awarded damages, wouldn't the more they have sold, inflate the settlement?
Or do they do it simlpy as bargaining chip. If thats the case, why do judges so freely give them out?
Or is there another reason to it?
To avoid criticism; Say nothing, Do nothing, Be nothing.
One should be extremely careful when distributing technology in other countries. You never know when some screwy patent will foul things up no matter what your intention.
But seriously, can't a company appreciate a beneficial product? Or will greed always stand in the way of helping others?
http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/keyboard/olpc_patent_infringement_scam.html I like how the Nigerian patent office has an @yahoo email address!! Prepare for things to start getting wierd.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
They'll call off the lawsuit if they receive 20 laptops within the next 2 weeks, and will pay OLPC $5000 on receipt of said laptops...
Eben Moglen, invalidator of bioscience patents filed by his own university ("that is what tenure is for") is a public ally of the OLPC. I suspect he'll not only invalidate their patent, he'll drive em one step from bankruptcy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Will they demand to be paid via Western Union?
The purpose of the OLPC project in Nigeria is not to make a profit, but, basically, charity. OLPC is selling them at a loss there.
I feel this 1st class douchebaggery.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Like maybe a certain company that got handed its nuts in small brown paper bag recently gave them the idea?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
LAGOS, NIGERIA.
ATTENTION: THE PRESIDENT/CEO
DEAR SIR,
CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL
HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE NIGERIAN CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF $47,500,000.00 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) INTO OUR ACCOUNTS. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM A PATENT INFRINGEMENT LAWSUIT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT FIVE YEARS (5) AGO BY A FOREIGN CONTRACTOR. THIS ACTION WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA APEX BANK.
WE ARE NOW READY TO RECEIVE THE FUND OVERSEAS. IT IS IMPORTANT TO INFORM YOU THAT AS CIVIL SERVANTS, WE ARE FORBIDDEN TO OPERATE A FOREIGN ACCOUNT; THAT IS WHY WE REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE. THE TOTAL SUM WILL BE SHARED AS FOLLOWS: 70% FOR US, 25% FOR OUR LAWYERS AND 5% FOR LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL EXPENSES INCIDENT TO THE TRANSFER.
THE TRANSFER IS RISK FREE ON BOTH SIDES. I AM AN ACCOUNTANT WITH THE NIGERIAN NATIONAL PETROLEUM CORPORATION (NNPC). IF YOU FIND THIS PROPOSAL ACCEPTABLE, WE SHALL REQUIRE THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS:
(A) YOUR BANKER'S NAME, TELEPHONE, ACCOUNT AND FAX NUMBERS.
(B) YOUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBERS -- FOR CONFIDENTIALITY AND EASY COMMUNICATION.
(C) YOUR LETTER-HEADED PAPER STAMPED AND SIGNED.
ALTERNATIVELY WE WILL FURNISH YOU WITH THE TEXT OF WHAT TO TYPE INTO YOUR LETTER-HEADED PAPER, ALONG WITH A BREAKDOWN EXPLAINING, COMPREHENSIVELY WHAT WE REQUIRE OF YOU. THE BUSINESS WILL TAKE US THIRTY (30) WORKING DAYS TO ACCOMPLISH.
PLEASE REPLY URGENTLY.
BEST REGARDS
LAUGH!
zzzzzzzz
What?
1 Timber Lane, Natick, MA, 01760, USA
phone 339-987-9249, fax 508-647-4702
Put that into Google maps and have a look.
It's a house on a 100 foot square lot.
As pointed out in a later post, the OLPC project in Nigeria is basically charity.
If they continue having problems like this, simply don't send any to them. Let LANCOR explain to the Nigerian government and people how their greed and abuse of patent law is screwing up the education of Nigeria's children and putting them at a serious disadvantage to the country's neighbors.
Some keyboard internationalization research I did a few years back:
:)
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~crb002/ie574final.pdf
I bet it kicks their designs all the way to Timbuktu, which isn't too far from Nigeria
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
middle east we could buy 50 or 60 million of these and spread them out in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Oh, and send a few million to Cuba and Venezuela too.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
First of all, it's a design patent. It's not a utility patent. Design patents are used for stuff like the flowers on the handles of your silverware. (why that isn't done with copyright I don't know) Design patent rules are different from utility patent rules.
It's about using two extra shift keys for the non-ASCII characters. On his keyboard, he calls them "Shift2" and "Ng". This is a nice way to do languages that use the latin alphabet with a few abnormal extra characters.
It's not like the mode switch key used for Arabic. There, you press the key once to switch modes. (more like a caps lock)
It's not like the dead keys often used for European accents. There, you press an accent key followed by a letter key. The accent key does nothing until you press the letter.
It's not like the combining accent keys used in Microsoft Word. There, you press the accent key after the letter key. (so the software must display your "A" before knowing if it needs an accent)
It's not like the fancy stuff used for Chinese, etc.
He's claiming that two keyboard layouts are in violation. The first one is Nigerian, now used for all of western Africa. The second one is "US International", which is QWERTY plus stuff like the Euro and various odds and ends.
The Nigerian Patent Minister recently asked for my help in transferring a large sum of money to the US. I'm sure that if I ask him to, he can make this trouble go away. He has offered a very generous reward for my assistance. I'll ask...
Ooh...now it seems he wants to buy the car I'm selling, and he offered me $500 over what I listed it for (it's probably one of the money transfer expenses I had to wire him $5000 to cover), all I have to do is send the $2000 difference from the cashier's check he already had printed out in my name (what an fortuitous coincidence) to his friend.
I'm sure with our budding business relationship he'll help the OLPC project out.
See here for a very nice review of US law regarding reverse engineering.
I wonder what "illegal reverse engineering" means under Nigerian law, seeing as how it is generally permitted in the US.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
It looks like someone has seen an opportunity to grab attention and/or get some quick buck in a settlement. Remember guys, it's Nigeria!
From TFA: "LANCOR's technology named Shift2 keyboard technology has been used to create a new class of region specific based keyboards called KONYIN Multilingual Keyboards, which are currently on sale globally." I don't think you can be sure to call this one a patent troll. They are actually producing a product, not just holding a patent for the sole purpose of the suit.
Any comment mentioning moderation is automatically Offtopic.
I am pretty sure there are only a few ways to do a multilingual keyboard. It should not be something that you can patent.
Not only do I think this patent shouldn't be valid but these guys are suing whats basically a charity organization? Please!
As far as "not listening to nigerian law" it should be noted that they have an american office and they are suing in american courts using manipulating the flawed american patent system
I think some of your presedential hopefuls should make patent trolls an issue and establish a policy to fight against them.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Although my first instinct was to call them a patent troll I will have to admit that they are at least filing the patent now. I really hate it when patent troll company x waits 5 years, THEN files for patent infringement. Granted, I'm not thoroughly familiar on their patent nor Nigerian law, but these guys do deserve some credit for at least trying to defend their own patents. I still hate them, but at least they're filing now and not in 5 years like quite a few other patent trolls do.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Smells like M$ trying desesperately to throw more FUD on the OLPC project... it's not like they haven't bribed companies in Nigeria before.
US patent law is unique. Nigerian law is similar to most Commonwealth law; patent law is closer to European Community law. The same applies to reverse engineering. Just because its legal in the US does not mean that its legal anywhere else.
Pamela? Pamela, do you see that big bat symbol in the sky?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
God I love Nigeria! What a fine country!
There may have been a translation error, leading the Nigerians to believe OLPC was an acronym for One Litigation Per Child.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Remind me not to incorporate any more businesses in Lagos; could well be Nigeria's version of our 9th Circuit.
Pi Ran Out
That microsoft is behind this???
Here is the US international layout for OLPC:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Keyboard_layouts
Here is the Konyin layout for the US (you have to click on VIEW LAYOUT under UNITED STATES):
http://www.konyin.com/?page=home&menuitem=1
Maybe Konyin thinks that they invented making additional languages/scripts/special characters available via additional shift characters, but that's ridiculous; here is the Windows US International keyboard layout:
http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/US-InternationalLayout.html
See, lots of special characters via AltGr.
Whoever is tagging, I don't know if it's an attempt to make a race joke or what, but Niger and Nigeria are two separate places.
Strange how you never hear anyone complain about financial, medical and food aid going to that region. Is there any incentive for actualy helping that part of the world?
The "innovation" behind their keyboard is that they have more than one shift key (you know, like having an apple key; or like a "microsoft" or "super" key) and that they use the shift key to add accents (you know, like a German or Polish programmers keyboard). This is something which is beyond obvious; has been done before. Is in no way original and anyone who sues over such a thing is a Patent Troll, no matter what way they carry out the lawsuit or how long they have spent negotiating. Now, whilst I have resservations about OLPC; taking this lawsuit as it is and carrying it out against against a charity and people who are trying to do their best to help education of poor children is sick. The people behind this (and I doubt that it's just the Nigerian company doing this) deserve long prison sentences.
How are the KONYIN keyboard's multiple shift keys any different to ye olde AltGr key to access alternate - usually international - characters?
OLPC, the current best proof that no good deed goes unpunished.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As lead council I am tasked with getting hard working folks for a class action lawsuit. In fact there is money to be paid out to all comers, now. For a small down payment of $10,000 you can get a share of the 15 billion we have currently collected. Please email me your personal information, social security number, payment information etc so you can receive a one time lump sum payment.
Bob Cummings Esquire
Nigerian Law Council Partnership Program
1 Important Legal Way
Sokoto Nigeria
What's the secret ingredient in mapping key presses to character codes?
When you sue someone you have an obligation to mitigate the damages. You're supposed to be righting a wrong, not milking it.
GOLLYgosh-WOW, Captain Future, it's the Meta Key...
..er.. World Class Innovators Who Were So FOULY Wronged..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard!
I call Prior Art! (is that meaningful in Nigeria? I have no idea...)
BTW, the linked "article" seemed mostly a singing-of-praises for the
1. Design a Product 2. Get sued by a patent holder 3. Post to Slashdot 4. Slashdot finds all prior art for you 5. ??????? 6. Profit!
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Someone needs to start digging and see how many OS patents they infringe. That is what open source companies obtained their patent portfolio for in the first place (http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/05/opensource_pate.html)
They will probably come to some bilateral arrangement if they are hit by a couple of hundred infringements and a cease and desist order themselves.
It strikes me as remarkably inconvenient that there just happens to be a company which is US-based, Nigerian owned and happens to have a patent on something which so directly affects to OLPC project. How many companies can there be which fit this description?
Putting my tinfoil hat on for a moment, it's not possible that this company is a stooge for Intel or Microsoft, is it?
Maybe they are going to get the names and e-mail addresses of the people who 'donated' to the OLPC and send them an e-mail telling them how one of their distant relatives died in Nigeria and their assistance is needed to settle the estate.
Fight Spammers!
If OLPC somehow manages to escape LANCOR, I hear PARLACC has filed a suit in a Carkoonian court. Litigations would last 1000 years!
There are open source patent portfolios which have been accumulated specifically to defend open source projects. I am sure that they infringe at least a few, perhaps more. Hit them with infringement suits and a cease and desist order for their products, and I expect they would quickly come to some bilateral licensing agreement.
Unless this is a company that stands to make more from "certain investors" than from continuing in their normal line of business, in which case we need to make an example by invalidating their patent claims and sue them for infringement of OS patents.
Why sue a company that is trying to do some good in the world?
Screw patents, patent holders should be forced to prove that the alleged infringer has seen their product and then copied it.
Maybe OLPC should change its name to OKPC in Nigeria and let the children remove the morons who make such rules and seem so intent on standing in the way of their education?
You had me right up until you said "Leave teaching to teaching professionals." That has to be one of the stupidest things I have heard in a very long time. Please, please, please tell me that you typed that without really thinking it through. Really, we all put our foot in our mouths now and then, so please tell me that you just had a momentary lapse of judgment in the fury of a flame war, and you don't really believe that teaching should only be done by teaching professionals.
http://www.guybrush.demon.co.uk/spectrum/docs/Keys.gif Enough said, really.
Looks like one presses ctrl+shift (or equivalent) then some key indicating which accent you want, which induces a modal change. The next character typed acquires the selected accent. Actually it would be nice to have this on standard US keyboards also; it would make it easier to type the occasional email in French or whatever.
You already do. Check out the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (for Windows 2000, XP/2003 and Vista).
In fact, if you're running Windows then you've already got several keyboard mappings installed following the same pattern, even though you don't use them.
If you look at the website, "inventive step" appears to have been the replacing of the normal keys next to the shift keys with a second shift. They call this "4 shift-keys". I'm assuming they mean four modifier keys. Is it possible to patent using a number of modifier keys? Heck, doesn't MS's keyboard layout tool already let you do that anyway? (It's not installed on this computer and I don't have admin rights -- I'll check at home tonight.) I bet their "software component" was written in MSKLC. Oh, I so hope it is... that must surely constitute prior art in itself....>/p>
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It sounds to me like the suit is over the fact that the OLPC might have implemented an open source driver for the konyin keyboards. If these keyboards are popular in Nigeria, that would make a good deal of sense.
It would also mean that this lawsuit is even more frivolous that most people are assuming it is. Reverse engineering for interoperability is, I believe, a legally sanctioned action.
The suit was filed in Lagos.
Can't someone just move some of those colorful little bricks around to change the suit?
This guy's the limit!
Lancor - hosted by ipowerweb.com. Administrative contact, bscinternational.com
... and to have their admin contact external (a MS partner BTW)...
konyin.com - hosted by ipowerweb.com Admin contact, oluwole@lancorltd.com
For an IT company to not actually have their own web server
Thoughts? How big is this company (they don't have a link on their web site to their Nigerian counterpart. They do have a link to Konyin.com, no drivers available for download there. Anyone got them?
I wonder how much email traffic has been transferred between Lancor and MS recently. SCO is sooo yesterday's news.
BTW - your lancorltd.com web site does not render correctly in FireFox.
They need at least $50 to bribe the Nigerian courts!!!
For what it's worth, I read it more as "Don't tell the teachers how to do their job - they've spent a lot of time on this and have reasons for their preferred solution", rather than "Don't teach anyone anything unless you're a professional educator."
(People with more knowledge on these things - feel free to correct me)
Microsoft is funding Lagos Analysis Corp. in order to slow down the OLPC initiative. Didn't Microsoft do something similar in the SCO/Linux law suits?
I think the Vic-20 also had what could easily be called multiple shift keys, as it could switching between Graphics and Text mode using the CBM key. Also the Amiga had two extra big A "Amiga" keys which could be used by software to do similar things.
Also multiple shift keys are nothing new at all, as there are many games (on many early home computers) that did this sort of thing going back decades. Even the concept of combos of keys is acting like various combinations of more shift keys.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
When I read this, I thought it was going to be a complaint about the laptop having some anti-spam software on it.
That is not what the parent said, but even if that is what was meant, it would be an incredibly stupid thing to say. Assuming that any professional should go unquestioned is a poor idea. It is particularly bad of an idea to not question teachers. Teaching is not rocket science, and the output of our public schools pretty much speaks for itself. Really, a lot of these public school kids can't read until they are 6 or 7, even after spending a year or two in preschool.
I have actually had a couple of these "profession teachers" try to tell me that you shouldn't even show kids actual letters until they are 3. Instead they are pushing this crap that has become popular amongst "educators" called Zoophonics. They seem to think pqbd are easier for a kid to learn than PQBD. And apparently punching, kicking, and animal fighting are good ideas for education.
It comes down to the fact that our public schools are in shambles, and no matter how bad the other parts are, teachers have to take take a very large part of the responsibility for that. So, question them.
Yes, I meant that Slashdot userid duggi, who I was flaming, should probably not teach if there were good teaching professionals available instead. His slant on education didn't really turn me on...
OTOH, your argument in a later comment that some teaching professionals are bad is somewhat of a "strawman" argument; although I do agree with you that the teaching profession (usually encouraged by their academic branch) periodically comes out with really bad pedagogical ideas and sometimes it takes them years to figure out how bad they are. My experience is that the better teachers are quite conservative and don't start using these revolutionary ideas until they have been field tested for a while on someone else's students (and often, to remain "politically correct" with their colleagues and with parents they have to give some lip service to these new ideas and claim they are "integrating" them in their teaching methods).
The OLPC is one of these revolutionary ideas and they're still looking for the first guinea pigs. I personally think it will be good in the long run, but the going will be rough at the start.
Dear Honest Individual ,gold and software merchant from Angola. I and my mother now residing in Senegal dakar west africa.
I am Stella McBride, aged 21years old the daughter of Late Darl Makoba a politician
As a result of the on-going problem in our country, we must relocate US$500 million of intellectual property to an overseas account...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
when you purchase your competitor's product
fta:
LANCOR's lawsuit alleges that OLPC purchased two KONYIN Multilingual Keyboard models (KONYIN Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard and KONYIN United States Multilingual Keyboard) with the express purpose of illegally reverse engineering the source codes for use in OLPC's XO Laptops.
Validity of the suit aside, poor choice of target aside, the blatant and open racist trash people are spewing in this thread is highly offensive.
Does it?
would you suck my cock for all of my cash?
Why make up a scenario? When they do violate the GPL, then we'll see. Until then, it's like you giving me a BJ.
I'm just waiting for the day when they patent fraud and then sue for it.
when taught to write with a pencil.
the XO is underpowered as a computer, but in its basic form, the XO isn't a computer. It's a book. It's an oracle. It's a source of knowledge. And knowing about computers isn't needed any more than how to bind a hardback book is before you read "See Spot Run".
As for Moosesocks' comment, copyright is a government construct. The government can suspend it whenever and for whatever reason they want.
So they suspend the copyright when scanning for school use. they scan one set of books and send a cheap van with a wireless AP "squirting" the scanned books out to all XO laptops it passes. When these XO laptops find an XO laptop that doesn't have the books, it "squirts" them to this XO laptop.
If the company doesn't like it, they can refuse to sell it there and then they lose any lost sale when the government takes a copy anyway.
Bosh bang wollop. Done.
And the books only have to be better than the dead-tree version they could get out for the same price. Easy-peasy.
When such bullcrap roadblocks are set up in front of something that can only help the Nigerian commoner, I suspect that OLPC has too much integrity, and too low a budget, to bribe some government dipwad. (Hey, I expressed my anger without cussing! The old church-lady substitution technique keeps me cuss-free on a technicality.) The things the children also need, which the gov't minister mentions in the BBC article ("facilities" meaning bathrooms I guess, furniture, school uniforms) are all things that Nigeria can supply on its own but the OLPC computers will take actual oil-money hard currency. If I understand Nigeria, the real money, which can be spent on luxuries, is already spoken for by the ruling class. When a program pops up that will actually divert some of that money toward helping the country, the logical gymnastics performed to defeat it are sadly impressive.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
That is good to hear. I'll just forget the other post, and chalk it up to a late night, and quick typing. I still say you are wrong though, as, everyone is and should be a teacher to the children around us. Anytime teaching is left only to professionals, even if there are good teachers around, kids are seriously missing out.
I don't think that pointing out how bad many teachers are is a strawman argument. The reason is that in my experience, about 15% of the teachers are good, about 20% are actively bad, and the rest are just punching the timecard. Of the 15% that are good, it is not that they have a vast amount of knowledge about kids that a reasonably aware non-teacher does not, but instead are very good because they care, they are willing to put in the effort (which most kids really do recognize), and because they have the patients and skill to pull off the job. This can include simple things like wearing deodorant so that you don't stink when you lean over to explain something to a kid. If we really did have these mythical good teachers that were really revolutionizing teaching, we would see kid getting out of school dramatically better educated than they did in the past. On the whole, we are just not seeing that. I would say that with the latest crop, we are actually seeing kids lose ground to their predecessors.
No doubt that staying politically correct is holding some good teachers back, as they are far out numbered by the one that cannot be defined as good, and thus would have serious problems if they rocked the boat. Of course, this is directly opposed to your advice to let professionals decide how teaching should be done, as it is the mediocre and bad teachers that are in control of modern education. The good teachers are just trying to teach kids while staying under the radar of the crappy ones. It's kind of like the guy that shows up on a Union job, and starts out performing everyone else 2 to 1. The other guys are going to have a chat with him to make sure that he doesn't make their job harder. When it comes to parents, the problem is just as much abdicating teaching to "professionals" as it is from teachers being politically correct. Of course, as I always state when discussing education, I'll say again, the unfortunate fact is that our public education system is broken on every level from the parents to President. Our education system has become a giant welfare system that is no longer (if it ever really was) about education the population, and has become a way to collect and disperse money, as well as a way to push political agendas.
All that being said, I do think the OLPC has some serious problems. To me the computer looks more like business seeding a new market while getting people who think they are giving to charity to foot the bill. The reason I believe this to be the case is that I believe the machine to be vastly over powered for the claimed purpose. This appears to be for the purpose of using AMD processors and running Linux, not because this is the amount of power necessary to run the applications necessary to achieve the claimed goal. Another reason is that they were so intent on making these system WiFi . The wifi is a significant addition to the cost, as well as adding moving parts that become a breaking point. For sharing data close by, sneaker net with SD cards would have been less prone to breaking, and served just as well. For Internet traffic, the whole project is likely to be a flop, as internet requires infrastructure, and that means they will need on going funding. We can't get reliable municipal Wifi here in the States. I see no reason to expect a village in Nigeria to do a lot better. Anyone that remembers the old C64 days knows just how good the sneaker net can be in distributing software and data. One thing that I'm not sure of is how the power is supplied. I know they dropped the hand crank, and they were talking about replacing it with a foot peddle. If there is no foot peddle, then this device is entirely
Whatever happened to all the old 8-bit systems from the 80's that permits entry of graphic characters via some weird combination of keystrokes? Don't they count as prior art?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Most children are unable to learn reading until they are 6 or 7 because of brain development not progressing far enough. It has nothing to do with how much they are taught they just can't get it until they are that old.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Absolute BS. Just because the they are not taught something, doesn't mean they can't learn. The people that tell you a kid can't learn to read until they are 6 or 7, are the same ones that will tell you that the entire world population became retarded in just a few generations. That somehow an age that could build nations, raise families, fight wars, negotiate piece, run nations, run farms, run businesses, and do all of the things that adults do, are somehow now too feeble minded to handle even the most basic of adult responsibilities. That they are now 'children'.
These are symptoms of environment, not genetics.
Hasn't this been debunked as a myth?
LANCOR's CEO is Ade G. Oyegbola. Googling "Oyegbola shawmut" reveals that Ade George Oyegbola was convicted of stealing over $335,360 from Shawmut bank in the early 90's. So he's a scammer after all.
> for the purpose of using AMD processors and running Linux
This article seems to totally contradict your comment (except for the running Linux part, but if not Linux, what operating system would you suggest? It's obviously much better to supply a standard OS if possible, no?)
> and they were talking about replacing it with a foot peddle
My understanding is that the current solution is a pull-string generator; hopefully it has a hefty enough flywheel to enable a single individual to both power the generator and work on the OLPC, but if not, the OLPC has NiMH batteries which will store charge to enable work with the distraction of power generation. I have the feeling that people will also figure out how to pull the strings with their legs even if it's not the way the generator designers planned they would use it.
> I suspect at best, it will be much like computers in the US. A few nerds will play with them because the think they are neat,
> and most people will not think they are worth the effort.
Now it's time for me to turn the tables on you. In the US, only a few nerds think it's worthwhile using computers? Don't tell me you've fallen into the same confusion as the guy I originally flamed, in thinking that the point of the OLPC is to advance computer science education. My understanding is that in addition to any pedagogical software, the OLPC is supposed to be supplied with a varied range of applications including music composition, drawing, camera + photo editing, etc., which will interest at least some of the children. Not to mention that the children in question have fewer alternatives for entertainment (e.g., no widely available television, if I am not mistaken).
with the distraction of power generation -> without ...
Oops!
LANCOR's CEO is Ade G. Oyegbola. Googling "Oyegbola shawmut" reveals that Ade George Oyegbola was convicted of stealing over $335,360 from Shawmut bank in the early 90's. Scammer indeed!
Useless as an editor, EMACS finally finds a use--prior art . . .
:)
lessee, I need an "s" at the end of this sentence. In EMACS, I need only type meta-alt-meta-caps-shift-meta s, and I get one!
hawk