olpc

Underexposed blog: links of the day

Best Seat in the House | The Seattle Times - I love Rod Mar's blog about shooting Seattle Seahawks football games. Interesting: lead photo printed with its crooked horizon. I also like to see when he uses his Canon 1D Mark IIN and when his 1D Mark III. He uses both, but with different lenses. Lies, Lies and Adobe Spies - Some carping about peculiarly masked IP address, actually owned by Omniture, that CS3 apps contact. See Adobe response here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/12/whats_with_adob.html Olympus raw codec for Windows Vista - Olympus joins Nikon, Canon, … Read more

Nigerian firm demands $20 million from One Laptop Per Child

Remember that Nigerian company headed by a convicted felon that sued the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project for patent infringement?

Well, the suit has finally been brought...in a Nigerian court...with $20 million in damages on the table.

The cheekiness is breathtaking.

As Groklaw reports, there is also:… Read more

Unboxing OLPC's XO-1 laptop

I'm a little late to the party with this unboxing of my new OLPC XO-1 laptop, but the machine arrived while I was out of town visiting my family for Christmas. In fact, there's a story there.

Before I left, I started hearing that people were receiving their XO-1's, and I realized that if mine didn't show up before I left, it would almost certainly arrive while I was gone. The OLPC people sent out no shipment notifications and didn't reply to several emails, so I had no way to delay the shipment or contact … Read more

Risks--and rewards--of XO laptop

Two weeks I wrote about how the XO laptop endowed a 9-year-old boy with seemingly magical powers (of intellectual curiosity and competence), and I wondered aloud whether my 8-year-old daughter would fare as well. On the one hand, she does like gadget gifts such as The Littlest Petshop. On the other hand, many such gadgets wind up as nothing more than a surface waiting to be decorated with stickers or glitter glue. Would her reaction to the XO validate or repudiate Negroponte's hypothesis that his project is an education project, not a laptop project? It seemed to work pretty … Read more

Christmas hits, and lumps of coal?

The buying is done, the presents have been unwrapped, the after-sales have yet to begin. I've dragged myself out of my Christmas-dinner-induced food coma long enough to ask which Christmas gadgets were hits, and which were disappointing lumps of coal?

Good thing this is a family blog because most of our gadgets were toys. Our 8-year old loved the WowWee Flytech Radio Control Dragonfly. She was able to overlook the fact that this toy was marketed to boys. After all, who wouldn't love a dragonfly? I spent the day wondering whether we'd make our way up the learning curve to work the controller before the dragonfly self-destructed during normal use. Yes, the dragonfly has to be ultralight, but with a styrofoam body and plastic fasteners (key elements that repeatedly popped off on "landing") we'll be lucky if the dragonfly lasts until New Year's Day. I was truly unimpressed by the remote control's engineering, particularly the connection between the remote's power cord and the dragonfly's body. The microscopic connection was hard to see and difficult to engage. Within a couple of hours I had to straighten out the connector pins. The good news is that dragonfly does fly, and one one spectacular run I actually got it stuck on our house's roof. My bad--thankfully we were able to back it out of the gutter via remote. My daughter is thrilled with the toy. I found it disappointing but maybe that's because at $40 a pop I am wondering how many minutes of fun we'll get out of this purchase. … Read more

XO laptop gives 9-year-old unexpected powers

On Thursday BBC News gave us a child's view of the $100 laptop. The article reads like a techie version of Jim Carrey's breakout movie The Mask, with Rufus Cellan-Jones as the star. The laptop, which came by way of Nigeria, unleashes incredible intuition and abilities in young Cellan-Jones:… Read more

More on Microsoft's effort to put XP on XO

Microsoft is serious about getting Windows XP to work on One Laptop Per Child's low-cost laptop, but the company still isn't sure it will be able to make a go of it.

In an interview, James Utzschneider, the general manager of Microsoft's emerging market unit, says Microsoft has devoted about 40 employees and contractors to work on its effort.

However, there are plenty of technical hurdles, he said. One of the biggest is the fact that the XO has no hard drive and only 1GB of built-in memory. The company concluded it needed at least 2GB of … Read more

Microsoft: XP coming soon to OLPC

Microsoft said Wednesday that it is working to develop a version of XP that can run on computers without a hard drive, including the XO computer from One Laptop Per Child.

In a statement, Microsoft said that it will start "limited field trials" of XP running on the OLPC computer in January. If all goes well, Microsoft said it could have XP running on the XO by the second half of next year. However, it cautioned folks in North America, particularly those taking part in the Give One, Get One program, that it has no plans to offer … Read more

A convict behind LANCOR's patent lawsuit against OLPC's

The Boston Globe is reporting that LANCOR, the Nigerian-owned company that has filed suit against the One Laptop Per Child project for patent infringement, is actually helmed by a man convicted of bank fraud. He spent a year in prison. Apparently not much has changed:

OLPC also has been hit by a patent-infringement lawsuit in Nigeria filed by Lagos Analysis Corp. of Natick. The suit claims the foundation stole the company's keyboard design. Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed.

The founder … Read more