Slashdot Mirror
Walter Bender Resigns From OLPC
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."
That now that OLPC is no longer a threat that all of the other vendors of small low cost laptops will simply stop offering them... Just a thought... :)
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'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.
E pluribus unum
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Maybe he was lured over to the fire nation.
My first thought was also that the story had something to do with the Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender -- forget the network; think Miyazaki, not SpongeBob. Excellent series in the vast wasteland of American animated TV.
However, it should be noted that Aang, the primary character, is not a Water Bender, but an Air Bender.
(Somehow, the inevitable loss of Karma for this way-off-topic posting seems unusually appropriate.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
krstic is not a loss to OLPC; I worked there for 2 years and Ivan was nothing but an egotistical brat who never showed up for meetings where he was supposed to present code he'd written, because he never actually wrote more than 500 lines of code and instead got interns to do everything he should have been doing from day 1.
To further reduce costs and increase battery life a RISC based processor should be used. Suitable ARM based System-On-Chip (SOC) processors run up to 800 MHz, thus reducing power consumption and increasing performance. Nvidia, ATI, and other companies make graphics accelerators that are more than sufficient to meet the video conferencing needs. The systems has an 800 x 600 display and uses NAND Flash memory with no hard drive, it should be thought of as an embedded product.
The XO laptop uses Nickel-Cadmium battery rather than a Lithium-Ion. The intended use case is for students who will only have power part of the day if at all. An Nickel-Cadmium battery is not suitable for this many recharge cycles. The hardware is NOT brilliant.
Sugar is a worthwhile project. Unfortunately, it is not yet stable (memory leaks, etc), the kinks of the completely re-imagined user experience have not been worked out, and not every "activity" that is needed to provide a complete user experience exists.
I hope that Sugar is not dead, because when that thing actually starts working...(famous last words?) More importantly, I hope that OLPC makes some very clear and unambiguous statements regarding the future and the status of Sugar, because it needs a strong developer community to survive, and I sure as hell am not going to write anything for it if it is completely abandoned. What a waste it would be, after so much good work.
I was reasonably impressed with the hardware. Had to cram some folded paper into the battery compartment to stop the rattling, but other than that the construction seemed solid. The keyboard is mushy, though, and probably the most annoying I've used since the Timex Sinclair 1000.
I've had the touch pad start freaking out in odd ways, with the pointer randomly jumping when I lift my finger to reposition it.
The screen is very impressive, especially for the cost. The camera is surprisingly good. The software is, IMHO, a steaming pile of crap in its current state, wholly unsuitable for its target audience. It's slow to load, simple operations like exiting programs are inconsistent between applications, and there seems to be little to no built-in help.
Both of my kids (ages 9 and 12) gave up on using it. My daughter (the 9-year-old) much prefers her old Gateway P2-550 laptop running Windows 2000, despite the machine being an ancient cast-off that ceased being a useful business computer several years ago. Firefox on that machine is vastly superior to the XO-1's browser, and the overall experience is much less frustrating.
Despite my doubts about the OLPC project from the beginning, I've WANTED it to succeed, and I still hope to see it succeed. I want to believe that the open source community can build something that will make a real difference in the developing world, but it looks like there's still a long way to go.
Maybe not everyone, but many did. We're talking pre-farming, which would count as business. Even then I bet there were "businessmen" who could survive even while doing less actual hunting or gathering than would normally sustain an individual.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!