OLPC Downsizes Half of Its Staff, Cuts Sugar 379
One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"
Re:Be Warned (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, it looks like they're not dropping Sugar completely, just "Passing on the development of the Sugar Operating System to the community."
Re:Be Warned (Score:1, Informative)
VA Linux changed their goals half a dozen times.
Who?
VA Linux [letmegoogl...foryou.com]. They own Slashdot, Sourceforge, etc. They started out as a Linux PC hardware vendor, which they no longer do. Now they make money from the ads on Slashdot and related sites, and sell SourceForge Enterprise Edition software to big companies.
Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
No kidding. Academics started Sun and Cisco, to name just the first two successful tech companies that spring to mind.
Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, cause it's rude to expect an academic to not understand the realities of business.
Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
No. Laptops that work well in full sunlight and are rugged and low power are not being built by anyone, and won't be. All these requirements require compromises that won't sell well in the first world.. and that's always the target audience. This is why trickle down economics doesn't work.
Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I was obviously assuming that my audience was already aware of how NN fucked up. He assumed Microsoft, Intel and all the politicians wouldn't play dirty. Then he whined about how dirty they were playing. They just ignored him, so he had a little hissy fit, then started making concessions. Game over. All of which could have been avoided if he had shown a little restraint and gotten buy-in from the big players.
Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
On February 12, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems.
Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple that worked in computer operations staff at Stanford University, later joined by Richard Troiano, founded cisco Systems in 1984.
Neither Graduate students, nor "computer operations staff" are not academics.
Get a clue.
Re:Be Warned (Score:3, Informative)
Good thing about the OLPC keyboard -- it has the control key in the right place. Also, while you mock the dirt issue, isn't it also intended to be water resistant and also deal with dirt in the air (i.e. less clean overall surroundings), not just actually rubbing dirt in it.
Isn't the screen on the OLPC fairly revolutionary? I know I should read up on it some more, but I think it's basically "use color at some specific resolution, or B&W at a higher resolution with significant power savings".
Re:They should have started selling it to American (Score:3, Informative)
No, they were hostile to changing the design for the developed world (since they are a nonprofit with a specific mission that that would contradict), and they were hostile to selling to any agency other than national ministries of education or something similar, because dealing with smaller lots and smaller entities drives up per-unit costs.
Re:What about books and roofs and pencils first? (Score:5, Informative)
Because, for one reason, a $100 (or even $175) machine designed to work as an e-book reader, backed by a project that was also developing free educational content, and which also was supplying low-cost satellite downlink stations supported by donated satellite time to provide internet access to remote locations, provides a less expensive way to distribute the same kind of material that would otherwise be distributed in the form of books in remote areas that often don't have decent road systems. You can replace a lot of books with one e-book reader with even occasional net access for delivery.
Books aren't cheap, even when you are just dealing with the printing costs.
Re:What about books and roofs and pencils first? (Score:1, Informative)
You really don't know what you are talking about. I live in Paraguay, a third world country in every sense.
We won't solve our problems with roof and pencils and books and shoes alone. It is very true those things are needed desperately, but we also need to educate our children for the 21st century.
I guess you just can't get it. My country will always be an underdeveloped one if we don't make our children know how things are done today, what can humanity accomplish today. Do you expect us to finally achieve prosperity by raising our children with just the basics for a 19th century world? This is the Age of Information. We need our children to grow interacting with computers as if that is supposed to be the way life is. Because in our times it is!
This is a much needed project, and it in no way interferes with other more basic needs. But you should stop thinking of our children as if their needs where different than those of your children.
My people need to grow knowing that there is something better. The most effective way to help 'the poor' is by having them know their situation of poverty is a changeable situation, not a defining characteristic of them. And make them want something better for their lives. Then, it will be up to them to get out of that situation of poverty. That is the hope this project brings to us. It is supposed to make children want more for their lives than what their parents live.
So IT DOES MATTER what OS they run. They are not meant to be 'cheap notebooks'. They are meant to be a powerful educational tool so children learn the world is not just the crappy situation they live with their families and their community.
Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
And taking into consideration his aversion to academics, he's probably dumb as well.
That's what an academic would say.
The problem with academics is that they outrightly disregard any information which wasn't formally codified as an academic work. If something is outside their world, to them it simply doesn't exist.
They're very proud of themselves and absolutely certain that their stand on anything is the most correct. So, yeah, many times you see a fantastic failure because the real world is not an university's lab.
Re:Wrecked to be wrecked. (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't run the Mac OS, you are not who the Genius Bar serves. Harrassing employees is extremely disrespectful IMHO. If you got me, I would have said, "You can run Ubuntu in Parallels, X comes with every copy of the Mac OS X, and many Linux distros do not support EFI out of the box."
--Sam