OLPC Struggles to Realize Ambitious Vision
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Greeted with fanfare and kudos when its prototype PC was shown off by Nicholas Negroponte and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan more than two years ago at the World Symposium on the Information Society in Tunis, the One Laptop Per Child project is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.
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First, the good news. The nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) announced on Monday that it has authorized the start of mass-production of the XO laptop, a low-cost but powerful device designed to reduce world poverty by extending the reach of the Internet to the planet&#39;s most remote regions.
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Circuit City has a plan to turn the company around, but significant challenges remain.
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âGive people the vision and hold them accountable, but let them do it their own way.â
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Company is working on flexible display technologies.
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In some cases, fights in Congress have slowed progress, or the U.S. government has focused on other priorities. In other cases, the cost of IT projects has been an issue.
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Scientists have struggled for years to make electricity from the sunâs light at a cost competitive with power from coal or natural gas. The challenges are formidable.
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The LED maker fulfills its promise.
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InfoWorld - Intel Corp. wants to see its low-cost Classmate PC help transform they way students in developing countries are educated. And the company is not alone. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project also hopes its low-cost XO laptop can close the &quot;digital divide&quot; that exists between the developed world and emerging markets.
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Is Microsoft working on building a laptop for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program? Yes, but the intended machine will run Windows XP only, rather than both Windows XP and Linux, Microsoft officials said today.
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ÂSuper Vision,Â the largest of the four inaugural shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, has an ambitious theme, but could use a little more curatorial daring.
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According to Intel, the OLPC not only asked Intel to stop working on its own low-cost laptop projects that competed with the OLPC's XO laptop, it also asked Intel to stop supplying chips to other partners, like Asus, working on similar designs.
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Just half a year after throwing its support behind Nicholas Negroponte's nonprofit, One Laptop Per Child, Intel says it's dropping out of the project. This latest in a series of blows to OLPC suggests the organization is having difficulties accomplishing its goals.
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Regulatory hurdles still to be jumped
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The&#160;One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC)&#160;and Microsoft are working together to develop a dual-boot system to put both Linux and Windows on laptops aimed at kids in developing countries, the head of OLPC said in an interview Tuesday.&quot;We are working with them very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that&#39;s up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it&#39;s very, very successful. We&#39;re working very hard to do both,&quot; said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC.It&#39;s a brand new development for the XO laptops, as the low-cost notebooks are known, and came about because of Microsoft&#39;s friendlier attitude towards open source software.Microsoft has embraced the open source community over the past few years in a very different way than before, Negroponte said. &quot;And that really helps, because it&#39;s become a little bit less religious than it was a few years ago and that&#39;s really good. In the end, I think, the more people that have software and hardware out there, the better.&quot;The OLPC laptop currently runs a Fedora-based Linux OS, and&#160;Microsoft has offered a version of Windows XP for the laptop project. There had been speculation that OLPC would simply offer two separate laptop PCs, but a dual-boot system could remove the need to offer two separate laptops. Such a device could also reduce the need to have competing low-cost laptops -- running Linux or Windows -- in the marketplace. Taiwan&#39;s Asustek Computer has already launched an ultra-low cost laptop PC capable of running Windows XP, and executives at the company have touted XP compatibility as an advantage over the XO.OLPC is also working with Microsoft and possibly the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation on combining OLPC laptops with some of the educational programs run by Microsoft in developing countries.&quot;There is talk in that direction and it&#39;s directly with Bill and [Microsoft chief research and strategy officer] Craig Mundie , especially this morning, so this is really cooking at the moment,&quot; Negroponte said.Microsoft has launched programs in a number of developing countries, including Vietnam and the Philippines, where it works with governments to build computer labs and Microsoft employees donate time to train people on how to use software and write programs.The OLPC Project started as an attempt to build a $100 laptop and work with governments to pass them out to kids in poor nations, but the laptop from the group, the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount at first. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope high-volume sales of the device will drive down costs.The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how software, the Internet and communications via computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers.&#160;
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After much hoopla over Windows Presentation Foundation and its promise to create rich graphical user interfaces for Vista, not many of the demonstrated technologies have become reality.
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InfoWorld - TheÂ One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC)Â and Microsoft are working together to develop a dual-boot system to put both Linux and Windows on laptops aimed at kids in developing countries, the head of OLPC said in an interview Tuesday.