A Dream Job - CTO of the OLPC Project

weibullguy dropped us a link from the IEEE's site. They've voted the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project as a 'Dream Job 2007'. Held by Mary Lou Jepsen, a former CTO for Intel, the position entails world travel, speaking with heads of state, and dealing endlessly with the technological challenges of a project designed to change the world. In the article, she relates some of the details of her first task on the job - redesigning the OLPC's display. "According to Jepsen, the display her team eventually marshaled into existence requires, depending on the mode, only between 2 percent and 14 percent of a typical laptop display's power consumption. ... To save watts, the display can switch between color with the backlight on, in low light, and black-and-white with the backlight off, in sunlight. OLPC's engineers trimmed battery usage further by, among other things, adding memory to the timing-controller chip, which decides how often a display refreshes. That trick enables the display to update itself continually without using the CPU if nothing changes on the screen."

Re:Why didn't they oh I don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

CTO stands for "Chief Technical Officer" as opposed to "Chief ToThePlaceAndFindOutWhatTheyReallyNeed Officer". The project starts with the (possibly wrong, but there's only one way to find out for sure) axiom that a laptop will be useful for these people. Perhaps technical qualifications in building laptops are more important to the CTOs position than precise knowledge of one particular area where they would be used. Note, that not only could you not have the technical knowledge if you spent your time in the places where the product would be delivered, you wouldn't even be able to tell about the special needs of the other places.

I'm personally not sure about whether OLPC is going to be a success, but the desperate knocking and bad advice the project gets seems to suggest to me that some really big commercial interests are deeply afraid of this. I wonder why? Afraid to lose your cheap labour? Afraid that it will drive the success of free software? Afraid the poor will rise up? What is it? To me it seems like a fairly innocent technology experiment which will probably be a partial success but won't live up to the wild dreams of it's originators. It's probably going to cost a bit and give an economic return which is a little bit more than the investment. Who cares? Why not leave it alone?

su laptop es mi laptop

[mikedeanklein]

They had better distribute 10s of thousands at a time...otherwise they'll be theft targets. Amsterdam had to do same thing with their yellow bikes.

Re:Why didn't they oh I don't know

[antifoidulus]

India and China certainly did. Their economies have been sustaining growth rates around 10%(and sometimes exceeding it in the case of China) for at least the past decade. That is an amazing growth rate, something the west hasn't seen in a long time. And how did they achieve this? It certainly because some white guy at MIT decided that he knew what was best for them. It wasn't philanthropy at all, it was greed, pure and simple. They started to privatize businesses and now more people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years than probably ever before in recorded human history, and greed helped them, not charity.

In fact, Africa has probably received more charity than China or India and is doing much worse than those countries. There are a lot of other factors involved of course, but it shows that charity isn't some magic bullet that can solve all of societies ills. If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Anything else does more harm than good.

Linux as BIOS and Windows as OS?

[Bernhard.Fastenrath]

The OLPC has a LinuxBIOS but it would be able to run Windows as well (and it probably will [1] [laptop.org]). If the Linux community was really pushing Linux to gain market share wouldn't you expect a dramatic increase in activity on edu.kde.org [kde.org] by now?

There would also be some larger development projects to be done. (How about some educational games like Genius - Task Force Biologie [wikia.com], Chemicus II - die versunkene Stadt [wikia.com], Mathica [wikia.com] for the OLPC, using Wikipedia articles as the knowledge part of the game?)

Of course it probably doesn't matter much if Microsoft offers a more or less free copy of Windows for the OLPC or Linux is used as the OS.