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OLPC CTO Quits to Commercialize OLPC Technology
theodp writes "The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow Monday, with CTO Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC (the first of Jepsen's pending OLPC patents was published by the USPTO on Dec. 13). The OLPC project halted consumer sales of the cheap laptop at the end of December."
Not that I RTFA or anything.
You got that right. FTA: "I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit," Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.
She was responsible for designing the display, which, depending on who you ask, is either really novel and cutting edge, or a substandard compromise to modern display design. Personally, the display is not anything I would want for standard laptop-like use.
The OLPC has their low-power display, and now she can go off and make the technology available to other markets instead of keeping it exclusive to the OLPC. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
A person claiming responsibility for some of the XO's innovations has left the OLPC in order to be compensated for her inventions. I don't see the problem with this. The power consumption technologies are amazing; hard drives, processors, and displays all consume a lot of power.
My laptop only runs about 40 minutes at full bore (i.e., if I disable all of the power saving features). There is much work to be done in this area. I'd like to see a huge transition from HDD to solid state disks (i.e., 2.5" and 3.5" flash-like drives), as well as from CISC to RISC processors, especially for servers running on the x86 architecture. The former is probably more likely. HDD pales in comparison to SSD for reliability, performance, and power consumption. We already have small devices that run on flash memory; why can't we use similar technology for laptops in the future?
"You could almost look at defense of Microsoft as a form of the Stockholm syndrome." -neapolitan
Rice and medicine are great in the short term, like after a disaster, but long term any free aid like that just kills local industry, ensuring that the third world country you're "helping" remains third world - and dependent on aid.
Laptops to poor people may seem useless (and I'm not convinced of their worth), but at least it's trying to change the underlying cause of being poor (access to production), instead of simply prolonging their existence for another day.
Not only that, but if commercial sales result in higher volume, then the production cost will go down, and it's a win for everyone: OLPC users, consumers who buy the commercial version, and of course the open source software world in which this machine lives.
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OK, they need to get the price down to $100. Instead of selling them in the US at $400 at a 100% profit margin to raise money for charity, they need to just sell the things for $199 commercially and take over the low end market. In a year or two, they'll be down to $99 through sheer volume.
Those things ought to be in bubble-packs at the local drugstore, alongside the cheap calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other low end electronics. This wouldn't stroke Negroponte's ego, but it would get the things out there in volume. Soon enough, they'd be available all over the world, purely on price.
Jepsen probably sees this. Negroponte wants to meet with heads of state and be in the press.
The linked patent may have Jepsen listed as an inventor, but it is assigned to "ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD ASSOCIATION, INC.", so I'm not sure why it's mentioned in the summary. She's can't use that without OLPC's permission.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Here are some links:
http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1414
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/thread.html#459
The general reason given for ending G1G1 was that it was a strain on the OLPC volunteers. See especially Nicole Lee's post http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/000474.html
Have you played with an OLPC yet? These machines are very clearly designed for children, not adults. Nobody with adult size hands could touch type on the keyboard.
That said, they're great little machines. One of our engineers bought one and we've been playing with it for the last couple of weeks. It's small, light, waterproof, and is quite capable. As far as I can tell, from both the hardware and software standpoints, the OLPC is exactly what they promised that it would be (except it's a little more expensive...hopefully they'll be successful in bringing the price down).
*sigh* back to work...
What afflicts the third world seems to be disorganization, corruption, dishonesty, and low intelligence. That's why they're in the fix they're in, just like some communities in the USA (trailer parks, urban ghettoes, "artist communes") are third world status because they're filled with dishonest, disorganized, foolish people.
And we all know that these characteristics are absolute, because everybody in these places is dishonest, disorganized, and foolish, and they're all there because they chose to be there. And because all success takes is somebody to decide they're going to dig themselves out. It's not about resources, it's about willpower. These people can end their struggle and saunter off to Cigarandbrandytown and make a mint whenever they like.
No, wait, it's not like that at all. People are born into poverty, it's a genuine bitch to get out of it, and most have to spend at least the first 16 to 18 years in it by default, during which they may either luck out and develop solid values and see what's so incredibly fucked about where they're coming from, or they may experience quite the opposite and have their health ravaged by subsisting on cheap convenience foods, using drugs, and placing heavy value on trivial material possessions viewed as luxury items --never mind the education issue. And then leaving home with no financial aspects whatsoever is an utterly fantastic way to get set to enter the job market, where most positions available for people with no certifiable skills provide precious little room for advancement in either position or wage; the result here is either changing jobs a ton and seeming unstable or unreliable, or sticking it out longer-term with one or two businesses and then not getting anywhere and looking like a slug who does the bare-minimum to not get fired.
I could go on, but speaking as somebody who *did* grow up poor and pull himself out to live in a decent neighborhood and ultimately land a job paying $40,000 a year -a sum many of you will figure as paltry, but it's more than I'd ever anticipated making when I was a kid watching the cops come and haul away the latest drug dealing neighbors every few months- I can tell you that the people who pull themselves out are exceptions. Most people are stuck there because their situation is utterly hopeless, many of them know no better, and there is precious little in the way of outside stimulus to encourage them to get out beyond waking up every day and knowing that the people in the nice houses thirty miles down the road consider you to be the scum of the earth, which isn't really "encouraging" in the way most people would use the word.
From what I heard, you're on the right track. Jepsen contributed her display patents to OLPC. She did a lot of important work for them. Criticizing her for going into business seems completely unfair. OLPC is a charitable organization, and is not permitted to compete in the market. For these technologies to take advantage of the market, they need to be developed by a business. This could be very good for them.