OLPC sends laptops to production, delays release
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InfoWorld - On Monday, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)&#160;moved a step closer to providing low-cost laptops to children in developing nations by giving the go-ahead to the mass production of its XO laptop. However, the computers are expected to be out in October, one month later than originally planned.
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A laptop under $100 could reach desks if a new venture formed by the former&#160;CTO of One Laptop Per Child, Mary Lou Jepsen, can deliver on its promises.A &quot;spin-out&quot; from OLPC, the company, Pixel Qi is looking to create a $75 laptop and trying to advance low-cost computers and power-efficient laptops, mobile phones, and other consumer electronics that are sunlight readable, Jepsen wrote on the company&#39;s Web site.Jepsen left OLPC two weeks ago to commercialize technologies she invented with OLPC, she said in an e-mail to the IDG News Service at the time. A patent lists Jepsen as one of the inventors of a display system optimized for low-power operation.&quot;Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO [laptop], while leveraging a larger market for new technologies,&quot; Jepsen wrote.There is a big commercial market for technology spawned by OLPC, Jepsen wrote. Prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of key technology advances, she wrote.The company will continue to work with OLPC by providing products at cost, and it will sell devices at a profit to commercial organizations.A similar promise to introduce a low-cost laptop came from OLPC, when it launched the $100 XO laptop in 2005. Since then, the effort has been afflicted by production delays and rising costs, which caused the laptop&#39;s estimated price to rise to $200. It is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.As CTO, Jepsen was responsible for hardware development for the rugged and power-saving XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its environmentally friendly design and innovative display, hardware and networking features.Her departure from OLPC spawned a debate, with critics charging that Jepsen was taking advantage of OLPC&#39;s nonprofit inventions for personal gains, but supporters shot back, saying it was the right time for her to leave a sinking ship.Jepsen, who is attending the&#160;International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, was not available for comment.
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InfoWorld - The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally aimed at developing nations to needy students in the United States.
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Microsoft Corp. has delayed automated distribution of a major security upgrade to its Windows XP Professional operating system, citing a desire to give companies more time to test it.
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Vendor's announcement of new Centrino notebooks is slightly early.
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Says too-conservative sales forecasting is responsible for long delays in getting new notebooks to consumers.
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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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Microsoft Corp. has delayed automated distribution of a major security upgrade to its Windows XP operating system, citing a desire to give companies more time to test it.
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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.
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Company hasn't said when the device will be available.
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Intel&#39;s resignation from the One Laptop Per Child Project&#39;s board of directors will have &quot;no impact&quot; on the group&#39;s operations, since the chip maker contributed little to the project since joining last year, OLPC President Walter Bender said in an interview.&quot;We never really got much going with Intel to have an impact,&quot; Bender said.Intel joined OLPC&#39;s board of directors&#160;in July as part of an agreement that seemed to bury the hatchet between OLPC and&#160;Intel&#39;s competing Classmate PC&#160;project. In addition to ending a war of words between Intel and OLPC, the two sides agreed to cooperate on technology development. Work also began on the development of a version of&#160;OLPC&#39;s XO laptop&#160;using an Intel processor instead of the AMD chip found in the current version.But the partnership agreement ultimately yielded little, and Intel made a &quot;seemingly half-hearted effort&quot; to build a version of the XO based on one of its microprocessors, Bender said.The development of&#160;an XO laptop based on an Intel processor&#160;was widely believed to rely on a version of Intel&#39;s upcoming Silverthorne processor, due out early this year. But the use of Silverthorne, billed by Intel as an inexpensive and power-efficient processor, was never confirmed by either Intel or OLPC, although Intel employees privately hinted at its use.Regardless of which chip was actually used in Intel&#39;s development efforts, the prototype laptop didn&#39;t live up to OLPC&#39;s expectations. &quot;They developed something that, as far as I know, is more expensive and more power-hungry than our current offering, so I&#39;m not quite sure what the point is,&quot; Bender said.Bender&#39;s comments underscore the mutual nature of Intel&#39;s decision to quit OLPC, but he also hinted at missed opportunities.&quot;My expectation was that there&#39;s lots of room for cooperation, particularly on software ... [but] I couldn&#39;t get Intel interested in helping me with any of those problems,&quot; Bender said, adding Intel executives seemed most interested in using the agreement with OLPC for marketing purposes and public relations.&quot;The only thing they were interested in was ... helping them make marketing statements about how Intel&#39;s approach to learning was different from OLPC&#39;s approach to learning,&quot; Bender said. &quot;They weren&#39;t interested in how we can learn together and make something better for kids.&quot;For Intel&#39;s part, a source familiar with the company&#39;s decision to resign from the OLPC board said repeated requests to abandon the Classmate PC in favor of support for the OLPC&#39;s XO played a major role. Intel has invested heavily in Classmate PC, which is currently being tested in several countries, and the company did not want to walk away from those efforts, the source said.During the six months that Intel belonged to OLPC, the chip maker contributed around $6 million to the project, the source said, estimating that Intel spent around $100 million on education-related projects last year.Bender declined to comment on Intel&#39;s financial contributions to the project.&#160;
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The One Laptop Per Child Project would welcome Intel back if the chip maker returned to the group, the head of OLPC said Tuesday.The statement came just days after&#160;Intel quit the group&#39;s board of directors&#160;over what it said was OLPC&#39;s insistence that it abandon a rival low-cost laptop developed by Intel, the Classmate PC. OLPC has said it asked no such thing of Intel, and that it welcomes the Classmate PC because the more low-cost laptops there are available, the more likely they&#39;ll get into the hands of children in the developing world.&quot;It was very unfortunate what happened with Intel and I hope there&#39;s a way of rebuilding it in the future because there&#39;s&#160;no interest in OLPC pushing Intel out. It just is not in our interest. Our goal is to get this to as many children as possible,&quot; said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, in an interview.He called it unfortunate that Intel made statements that OLPC asked the chip maker to stop working on the Classmate PC. &quot;The picture that painted was one of OLPC being anti-competition, which is ridiculous. We&#39;d like to see as many laptops out there as possible and kids have the widest choice possible,&quot; he said.Intel would be willing to talk with OLPC, said Agnes Kwan, an Intel manager. But she added that the organizational break-up came about because of differences that the groups have been so far unable to resolve.The OLPC Project started as an attempt to build a $100 laptop aimed at kids in poor nations, but the laptop from the group, the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount, initially. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope heavy volume sales of the laptops 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 the software, Internet and communications benefits of computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further and further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers, a conundrum commonly referred to as the digital divide.&#160;
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The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow this week, with Chief Technology Officer Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC.Jepsen, who joined OLPC as its first employee in 2005 after Nicholas Negroponte started the effort, will pursue an opportunity to chase after &quot;her next miracle in display technology,&quot; OLPC said in an e-mail sent on Sunday.Jepsen was responsible for hardware and display development for the rugged and power-saving&#160;XO laptop, designed for use by children in developing countries. Though the laptop has struggled to find buyers, it has been praised for its innovative hardware features and environmentally friendly design.Her last day with the organization is Dec. 31, though she will continue consulting with OLPC, according to the e-mail. Dec. 31 is also the end of OLPC&#39;s Give One Get One program, in which two XO laptops can be purchased for about $400, with a user getting one laptop and the other being donated.Satisfied that XO laptops were shipping in volume, Jepsen noted in an e-mail that she was starting a for-profit company to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC.&quot;I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit,&quot; Jepsen wrote in an e-mail.&quot;I believe that the work I led in the design of the XO laptop is just the first step in changing computing,&quot; she wrote.Powered by solar power, foot pedal or pull-string, the laptop doesn&#39;t rely on an electrical outlet to run, making it useful for situations where power is unreliable or unavailable. The laptop&#39;s specially designed lithium-ferro phosphate battery consumes between 2 watts to 8 watts depending on usage, compared to 40 watts on commercial laptops depending on usage.The laptop&#39;s battery lasts up to 21 hours because of custom-designed, efficient power-saving features implemented at the hardware and software level. Batteries in commercial laptops may explode at high temperatures, while XO&#39;s batteries can run and recharge in temperatures around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), Jepsen said in earlier interview.OLPC is also designing a cow-powered generator that works by hooking cattle up to a system of belts and pulleys.For connectivity, the laptop has mesh-networking features for Internet access.
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The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows.
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African countries are bracing themselves for this month's rollout of US$150, Linux-based laptops for school children under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.
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Taiwan&#39;s Asustek Computer complained on Tuesday of a shortage of Intel central processing units (CPUs) for laptop PCs, but said it didn&#39;t expect the problem to affect its sales.&quot;The biggest shortage in notebook components is in CPUs, Intel CPUs. Intel isn&#39;t meeting demand,&quot; said Jerry Shen, president of Asustek, answering questions at an investors conference in Beitou, Taiwan.The statement highlights persistent problems laptop PC makers have faced this year in trying to procure certain parts. Strong demand for mobile computers has caused&#160;a shortage&#160;of small LCD (liquid crystal display) screens and small hard disc drives (HDD), laptop makers have complained. Therecall of around 10 million laptop batteries&#160;containing cells manufactured by Sony has also kept these vital parts in short supply since last year.Intel could not immediately be reached for comment.Back-to-school sales in September, and the run-up to the end-of-year holiday season are hot times for people to buy new laptop PCs, and hype around Microsoft&#39;s Windows Vista and&#160;Intel&#39;s Santa Rosa laptop chips&#160;has given an added spurt to demand this year. Laptop PC sales are expected to hit record highs, and some companies believe the market will grow by around 30 percent next year.Supplies of certain laptop parts could become more plentiful once the peak season ends and demand slows down.Meantime, laptop makers have had to keep up with suppliers by maintaining relationships and building inventory when they can.&quot;Our relationship with Intel is good so we don&#39;t have a big problem, but if it wasn&#39;t so good, our troubles might be worse,&quot; said Shen, of the CPU issue.Asustek forecasts it will ship between 4.2 million and 4.4 million of its own-brand laptops this year, not including its popular new Eee PC. The company has targeted shipments of up to 400,000&#160;Eee PCs&#160;this year.&#160;
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MICROSOFT has delayed automated distribution of a major security upgrade to its Windows XP Professional operating system, citing a desire to give companies more time to test it.