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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."
Did his final words as he left have anything to do with biting his shiny metal ass?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Summary and original speculation were complete BS.
To keep in the spirit of the thread, XP smells worse than your shiny metal ass.
Teach children how to learn to learn learning.
From a business standpoint, less romanticism is a GOOD thing.
The problem with OLPC is that it is not a $100 laptop, and for its current price, people can get a much more powerful and real laptop. The OLPC is a toy. Third world kids need real computers that run real software.
As someone who thinks the hardware is brilliant but the sugar software stack is an abomination, having the leading driver behind the abomination give up and leave because the XO is getting too close to BorgLand is a good thing for the project's viability.
An XO running XP which is modded to run at the screen resolution (unlike the ugly Classmate "scrolly-screen" hack) would be a nice platform.
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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... :)
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.
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Maybe he was lured over to the fire nation.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
It was the demotion of Bender that prompted Ivan Krstic' to resign last month, so the damage to OLPC by their stupid demotion of Bender is not limited to just the loss of him. I wonder if anyone else will be leaving over this?
Direct Link to Resignation letter
I was going to submit this story after finding it on Digg or Reddit; the headline was focusing on Negreponte(sp?) allegedly wishing to partner with MS to put XP on XO in order to sell more units. After reading the letter and there being no mention of it I decided against submission.
What does that mean? Does that mean OLPC is lacking paper clips or advanced audio technology that came hidden in a pink box? Or they lack negotiating skills that is needed to change a NO into a YES, aka ISO Norway style? May be they just need a can do guy like Bob...
... "bite my rubberized, lime-green ass."
Anybody want a peanut?
Oh well I thought there was some news about Avatar, but I guess I'll just have to keep waiting.
A: The x86 used is already very low power and very high integration, supporting sub-millisecond sleep states. With Amdahl's law being what it is, replacing the processor with a mystic 0 power CPU wouldn't add all that much to battery life. The TOTAL power consumption is 5W already, and the CPU's share of that power budget (when you consider CPU and not the associated control logic for memory, IO, etc) is low.
And in return, x86 compatibility is a good thing, because it opens up a huge world of binary software. For one, x86 is far better supported by just about everybody.
B: The OLPC actually uses a 15 W-Hr LiFeP (Lithium Ferro-Polymer) battery. Which is actually 4x the charge lifespan of LiIon, and has far greater environmental tolerance, and can even be composted for disposal.
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On departure, Bender was spotted saying
"I'm going to start my own laptop project with blackjack! and hookers!"
Nowhere in his exit statement does Bender contradict the rumors about him being forced out. Instead he gives the standard "leaving to pursue other interests". This is a conventional explanation people give to avoid antagonizing their former colleagues. This concept might be strange to shot-from-the-lip Slashdotters, but it is common among people who don't view life as extended flame war.
You give a quote that seems intended to contradict the story, but doesn't really — this isn't just about whether or not the XO should run Windows. Besides, you don't say who you're quoting. One of your sock puppets, perhaps?
Quick, grab the samples before they disappear! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples
Everytime I hear "corporate restructuring" the voice in my head says "That's c.e.o. b.s. for stepping on people in the name of money, despite the 1st rule of death being 'you can't take it with you'", at which point an audible and double-edged "duh" escapes my lips.
Come on, with the size of demand that's been uncovered for them? Nah. Certainly I can't see Asus giving up any time soon, since they're shifting Eees faster than they can ship them... and since I'm both broke and cheap, I've promised myself an Elonex ONE if/when they arrive.
Negroponte said Bender was burned out after helping to shape OLPC for two years" But Bender already has new plans: to launch an independent effort to further the development of the XOs' homegrown software, known as Sugar, and get it to run on Linux computers other than XOs. "Sugar is in a narrow place and it is ripe to be unleashed," he wrote in an e-mail exchange. The AP article alos goes on to quote Negroponte as saying: "that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way." For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web. "There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist." Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it. That might disappoint advocates of open-source software who helped bankroll OLPC and cheered the challenge it represented to Microsoft's dominance. Unlike proprietary software like Windows, open-source applications are developed by a community of programmers and the underlying code is freely shared.
It appears Slashdot's editors didn't not even click the links. OLPC News is a Microsoft FUD shill. Don't like them except to point out that they are lying baboons.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
OLPC's educational philosophy was officially based on Papert and Kay's constructionism, which is related to constructivism but not the same thing.
The idea is that students build actual things (even if software is rather abstract) which they can share with other students and the teacher as a reflection of the knowledge they have built inside their minds.
You don't cite any sources or define what you mean when you say "Asus is doing very well with its flagship offering.". However the chief error is more profound than that. Asus' business model isn't our problem either. Asus isn't running an educational project. Asus is just another corporation making just another laptop.
Many people conflate OLPC's work (which really is an educational project) with making a low-end ultra-inexpensive laptop because they view everything through first world consumer's eyes. These same people tend also to be shocked that OLPC isn't using the G1G1 program to generate lots of profit.
Digital Citizen
If you were engaged in a discussion with a person and suddenly six others showed up to shill and agree with the original one, how would you like that?
Everytime I say something, I see a six or seven nutballs screaming Twitter. In this case the off topic thread is large and suspiciously well moderated. Oh well.
I quoted the article. You would know that if you followed the link instead of flaming me. The author updated himself and quoted Bender quashing those stupid XP rumors.
I quite agree. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. I have been screaming that they should have used Maemo or some other Webpad GUI. Keyboard and mouse support is built in and the icons are big already. Add Open Office then SHIP.
I suppose that once they're done, every child will be able to surf the net and get trolled on MySpace even though they can't eat...
What good is a laptop to you when you can't even say where your next meal will come from?
The Open Source community could build something that would make a real difference in the developing world --
if we stopped dicking around with laptops and started collaborating on high-yield, low-input agricultural methods, water reclamation systems, sanitation, and low-conventional-energy devices generally. Great examples: the discovery that pouring water through silk provides enough filtration to substantially reduce the incidence of cholera; the development of solar cooking technologies to help stop deforestation and prevent women from having to gather firewood alone in regions with prevalent rape gangs.
THAT is the kind of tech that we should be working on collaboratively. Though there isn't any Linux involved.
OLPC is a great idea, but it doesn't actually address the real problems of the developing world--which aren't web browsing, intuitive programming, and videoconferencing, but security, environmental repair, and conventional-energy-independent development! All this talktalk about laptops has always been the well-meaning but sorely out of touch "help" provided by people who know tons about OSS but have no idea what people in developing countries really need.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
it does work and if I can remember the final steps, it shouldn't be too difficult for many to try it out.
1) boot the Ubuntu LiveCD with a network connection
2) open Synaptic Page Manager( System->Administration->Synaptic...)
3) enable the Universe repository found in Synaptics Settings->Repositories menus
4) reload as the dialog will suggest
5) do a Synaptic search for Sugar using the search icon in the upper right of the application
6) select Sugar and Sugar-Activities
7) Click the Apply button
8) when all is done, go to the Login Manager(System->Administration->Login Manager) and unCheck the option for only single user login.
9) switch user from the top launch bar on the desktop, change the Session Type to Sugar, and use the "ubuntu" username with no password.
You should now be running Sugar with a bunch of activities already installed. I only tried the chat activity and it works great. Start it, share it with the network and then invite people to join from the network view(f1).
For some reason, I could not get the web activity to work though it works fine in my installed version of Sugar on Ubuntu 8.04.
Really, this desktop system( Sugar ) and the Journal are a really nice UI for the classroom so that the teacher does not have to spend much time on the UI. Also, students can easily get to their assignments right from the Journal and finish up what they were doing in class. Again, without very much training at all.
FYI, some activities like eToys are not 'real' Sugar activities and are instead Sqeak/Smalltalk applications wrapped in Sugar. Many of the native Sugar activities work as would be expected.
Anybody who's thinking of chiming in on this thread should have spent a couple of hours exploring this system with the understanding that it is designed for children in a classroom with a teacher organizing classwork and homework. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus