OLPC:News
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 The Children's Machine and Learning Vision.)
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.
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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.)