Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Walter Bender Resigns From OLPC

Posted by timothy on from the shiny-but-not-an-ass dept.

westlake writes "Walter Bender, the former executive director of MIT's Media Lab, and, in many ways, the tireless workhorse and public face of OLPC, has resigned from OLPC after being reorganized and sidetracked into insignificance. The rumor mill would have it that 'constructionism as children [learn] learning' is being replaced by a much less romantic view of the XO's place in the classroom and XO's tech in the marketplace."

3 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Sadly, no... by nweaver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The software stack may be questionable, but the hardware is brilliant.

    Nothing else comes close for efficiency, cost, battery life (with working software), ruggedness, total lifetime, etc.

    The thing is VERY tough (i've tossed mine several times), very low power (3 hours battery life with 100% broken power management. Good power management should get 6+ hours battery life for typical users), with a brilliant screen. Just put real software on it and its very nice.

    Let alone the environmental tolerance: Normal notebook batteries die if you try charging them at 100F.

    --
    Test your net with Netalyzr
  2. Re:Instead OLPC should deepen its approch by sm62704 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But first you have to learn the teachers how to teach to teach teaching.

    My brain hurts.

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
  3. Re:GOOD... by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There were rumors posted at one point that Apple had offered to donate a core OS, but were turned down for not being completely open-source. Perhaps if those rumors had any truth, they could be fulfilled now.

    I hope not. Look I'm as big of an OS X fan as anyone, but it is not really suited to the OLPC project in a number of ways. Also, the all OSS stack makes sense with regard to their mission, to bootstrap an intellectual property creation industry in these nations. Being able to edit and modify all the code provides a starting place for this project to sustain itself via the user base.

    I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.

    The OLPC software is very well designed for its core tasks of educating children, which is quite different from general purpose computing. As a kid, I'd much rather have had an OLPC that allows me to learn with all the other kids in my school, than even a modern OS X system. Swapping it out for OS X makes little more sense than doing the same with WinXP.