[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-08-26)

[Walter Bender]

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 http://wiki.laptop.org)

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.

-walter

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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org