PUBLIC MARKS with tag olpc

Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen was previously the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop Per Child. Notably Mary Lou invented the laptop's sunlight-readable display

At OLPC's Global Country workshop today, founder Nick Negroponte unveiled the next-gen XO Laptop, and it totally blows the original away. Wow! Dual touch screen!

8.5 GB of Free, CC-Licensed Samples from the OLPC Project, and OLPC Music Tools

A classmate PC, powered by Intel, is a small, mobile learning assistant and educational solution that Intel specially developed for students in emerging markets.

Hardware of the OLPC seems very robust and well designed. Software seems to sucks.

* Dimensions: 242mm×228mm×32mm (approximate—subject to change) * Weight: Less than 1.5 KG (target only—subject to change) * Configuration: Convertible laptop with pivoting, reversible display; dirt- and moisture-resistant system enclosu

one laptop per child

The software is far from finished. An early version of the GUI and window manager are available, and a few small demo applications: chat, video, two games, and a web browser, and that's about it! The plan is to write all applications in Python (except for the web browser), and a "view source" button should show the Python source for the currently running application. In the tradition of Smalltalk (Alan Kay is on the OLPC board, and has endorsed the project's use of Python) the user should be able to edit any part of a "live" aplication and see the effects of the change immediately in the application's behavior. (A versioned document store will make it possible to roll back disastrous changes.) This is where Krstic wants my help: he hopes I can work magic and implement this feature for Python. I got started right away during the conference, with a reimplementation of python's reload() function that can patch classes and functions in place. Even this small component still has a long way to go; a checkpoint of the work in progress is checked into subversion as part of the Py3k standard library. That's not where the rest of my OLPC work will show up; they use GIT for source control, so I will get to learn that.