OLPC:News: Difference between revisions
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=LAPTOP NEWS= |
=LAPTOP NEWS= |
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1. Stealing a page: Stephon Marbury, a superstar guard on the NY Knicks, yesterday introduced the Starbury, a $15 pair of sneakers aimed at poor kids whose parents cannot afford the up-to $200 that some high-end sneakers cost. Marbury says he will even wear the Starbury in NBA games this winter. Maybe OLPC has started something. (The story appeared in Friday's NY Times.) |
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1. OLPC's Mary Lou Jepsen was married to John Ryan today at a sea-side |
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ceremony in New London, Conn. |
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2. David Cavallo reports that the Brazilian government is finalizing their plans for all aspects of laptop roll-out. As the project to date has been coordinated by the presidency with the assistance of the Ministry of Education, they will now begin to work more deeply with other ministries. |
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2. We are close to converting over to LinuxBIOS/Linux as bootloader, a new |
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X graphics driver, a new display kernel driver, easy installation path onto |
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internal flash and disk, and the ability to run off of internal flash; some |
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last minute bugs have delayed this conversion until sometime next week. |
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3. Alan Kay and the eToys team came to the OLPC offices in Cambridge this week to get an update on the UI (which went through several more iterations this week) and to demonstrate eToys running on the OLPC hardware. Without any extensive fine-tuning, simple eToys animations were able to run at up to 10 hertz. The team will be back in September to work more closely with Red Hat and OLPC in integrating our efforts. |
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3. Mitch Bradley has learned his way around LinuxBIOS, and has brought up a |
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Forth implementation on it. Forth is a very productive environment for test |
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and debugging of hardware, and will come in very handy for easier debug, |
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testing, and exercise of the CAFE chip. A Forth environment allows for |
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immediate turn around of tests on hardware without a compile, link, reboot |
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step that a conventional device driver requires. |
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4. There are two new essays that overview the project in the wiki: “The Children's Machine” is a description of the OLPC technology written by Stephen Michaud; “Learning Vision” is a description of our epistemological approach written by David. (See http://wiki.laptop.org) |
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4. Zephaniah Hull has been working on the X Input Extension support for the |
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new dual-mode touchpad, along with work on the X configuration extension |
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needed for better calibration support for the device. It looks likely we |
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will base our first release on the upcoming X.org 7.2 release, due to its |
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support for hotplug of input devices, being implemented by Daniel Stone of |
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Nokia. |
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5. The camera sensor has been the focus of considerable discussion over the last week. Two key changes were made: first, the camera has been changed |
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5. Jonathan Corbet is contracting with OLPC to develop the camera driver |
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from an optional component to a standard feature—all OLPC machines will incorporate a video camera; second, the camera itself has been increased in resolution. While the initial camera sensor had offered CIF (352×288) resolution, the new camera sensor will offer the considerably higher VGA (640×480) resolution. |
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for CAFE. Jonathan is well known in the Linux community, operates the |
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“Linux Weekly News” web site that is a vital communications point of the |
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developer community and literally wrote “the book” on Linux device drivers, |
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now in its third edition. |
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6. Jim Gettys met with Adam Jackson of Red Hat to discuss how to best |
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modify the X Window System in support of our power-saving schemes. These |
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include: (1) dropping the refresh rate when updates slow; and (2) driving |
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the display from the display controller, allowing us to disable the Geode's |
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video drivers. |
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Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News]. |
Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News]. |
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Revision as of 21:57, 26 August 2006
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Stealing a page: Stephon Marbury, a superstar guard on the NY Knicks, yesterday introduced the Starbury, a $15 pair of sneakers aimed at poor kids whose parents cannot afford the up-to $200 that some high-end sneakers cost. Marbury says he will even wear the Starbury in NBA games this winter. Maybe OLPC has started something. (The story appeared in Friday's NY Times.)
2. David Cavallo reports that the Brazilian government is finalizing their plans for all aspects of laptop roll-out. As the project to date has been coordinated by the presidency with the assistance of the Ministry of Education, they will now begin to work more deeply with other ministries.
3. Alan Kay and the eToys team came to the OLPC offices in Cambridge this week to get an update on the UI (which went through several more iterations this week) and to demonstrate eToys running on the OLPC hardware. Without any extensive fine-tuning, simple eToys animations were able to run at up to 10 hertz. The team will be back in September to work more closely with Red Hat and OLPC in integrating our efforts.
4. There are two new essays that overview the project in the wiki: “The Children's Machine” is a description of the OLPC technology written by Stephen Michaud; “Learning Vision” is a description of our epistemological approach written by David. (See http://wiki.laptop.org)
5. The camera sensor has been the focus of considerable discussion over the last week. Two key changes were made: first, the camera has been changed from an optional component to a standard feature—all OLPC machines will incorporate a video camera; second, the camera itself has been increased in resolution. While the initial camera sensor had offered CIF (352×288) resolution, the new camera sensor will offer the considerably higher VGA (640×480) resolution.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.
Press requests: please send email to press at laptop dot org.
MILESTONES
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| 06 Jun. 2006 | First video with working prototype [1] |
| 28 Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| 13 Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| 16 Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop Intiative Officially Announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland |
PRESS
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found here.)