OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Dick Rowe has joined us as President of the OLPC Foundation. Former associate dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and Chair of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Dick spend several years working in Nigeria with the West African Examinations Council and more recently directed the Internet and Information Services team of the Howard Dean Campaign.
With Dick's leadership, the Foundation will be responsible for the "bottoms up" work of the OLPC mission: raising investments from corporations, foundations, and individuals that will be used to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of XO Laptops as learning tools for children. OLPC's new website contains information about the Foundation under the "Participate" arrow.
2. Davos: The OLPC Foundation was officially launched last week at the World Economic Forum, where guests at a formal dinner hosted by Rupert Murdoch were able see a demonstration of the XO's talents at making music and taking pictures.
3. Addis Ababa: Calestous Juma gave the keynote address at the Summit of the African Union, a meeting of the African heads of state. In his address, he introduced them to the XO Laptop.
4. New York: Walter and SJ Klein presented at the UN Committee on Teaching About the UN. The audience included roughly 500 educators, many of whom have connections with schools in the least-developed countries (LDCs).
5. Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas ran a two-day technical workshop on mesh networking at the Federal University of Fluminese. National coordinators from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, technical teams, and students working on the mesh attended.
6. B2 build: 650 units have been built at Quanta Shanghai. The rest of the B2 units will likely be built by the end of this week.
7. Touch pad: Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Mitch Bradley and Chris Ball spent much of the week diagnosing (and fixing) problems with the touch pad.
8. Chris Ball, Adam Jackson, Dan Williams and Jordan Crouse all spent time this week investigating why many graphic operations on the machine appear too slow. They came up with some strategies for improving performance. More work needs to be done in this area; a final resolution on these issues has not been made.
9. John Palmieri has been working on fixing issues in our front-end infrastructure. This includes more fixes for the canvas, some memory-leak fixes for the underlying message bus and more work on the Python bindings for the bus. He also spent some time looking at a Python launcher process that Johan Dahlin, an active external community member and owner of some of our more important components has created for us. This process is very likely to decrease the startup time for activities built with Python as well as save us a good bit of memory for each process by taking advantage of Unix copy-on-write capabilities.
10. Marco Gritti updated Sugar to use xulrunner 1.9 (the basis for the upcoming Firefox 3); he also pushed out a bunch of new Sugar snapshots and did more work on the activity-bundle specification.
11. On Friday, John, Dan, Chris Ball, and Chris Blizzard went to Boston University to take place in FUDCon Boston 2007, a gathering of several hundred Fedora users and developers from all over the world. Fedora-specific topics were discussed including a large number of topics related to OLPC. Saturday and Sunday of this weekend are the Fedora Hackfest days; the laptop will be one of the "hackfests" taking place. They intend to work on the Python launcher and some bundle and activity topics.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org
MILESTONES
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
| Dec. 2006 | Uruguay announced its participation in the project. |
| Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
| Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
| Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
| Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
| Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
| Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
| Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
| Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
PRESS
PRESS RELEASES
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative. |
| Dec. 2006 | Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning. |
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary
http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo