More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
ClassMate squabble: Intel exiting OLPC after tangling with Negroponte—and meanwhile Mary Lou Jepsen’s left
January 4, 2008 | 7:01 am
|
By David Rothman
“Intel has decided to pull out of the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit organization after a dispute with its chairman, Nicholas Negroponte. Intel said today that Negroponte asked Intel to resign from the group because Intel would not end its support for other programs beyond the OLPC…Agnes Kwan, a spokeswoman for Intel, said that Intel tried to work things out with Negroponte during the past months. But Negroponte wanted Intel to end its ClassmatePC program which didn’t have the XO Laptop’s software. It seems he wanted to standardize on his own standard.” – Dean Takahashi’s Talk Talk Blog.
The TeleRead take: Oh, great—just when OLPC was enjoying new momentum from the success of Give One Get One. Who knows who’s right in the Intel-OLPC feud? Based on the specs and my hands-on with the XO, I can say who makes makes the best e-book machine. And that’s OLPC by a longshot. But, yes, Negroponte is into control.
Could this be one reason why Mary Lou Jepsen, the creator of the XO’s e-book friendly screen, is no longer with the main OLPC or at least has backed off? Instead she’s started Pixel Qi, described as “a spin-off from One Laptop Per Child.” The new device-designing company will focus on “Extreme low-cost,” “Extreme low-power,” “Mass producible new display technologies” and “Outdoor use, sunlight readability and robustness.” Oh, and she’s recruiting at CES. (Thanks to Bennett Z. Kobb for the Pixel Qi link.)
Related: TechMeme round-up.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Do you think her screen is better than eInk? Still awaiting some report from you (maybe I need to go to Previous Posts?).
It would be interesting to see if her screen would be picked up by any reading device makers.
Let’s see; which is better for education: A laptop OS designed from the ground up to *show you the code* and allow you to modify any and all details of the system, applications designed for native collaboration, and with inbuilt version control so you can always roll back to a working version; or a laptop OS designed to hide all internals all the time, no collaboration tools, no version control, and a notorious reputation for being difficult to maintain with inexperienced users?
One is the OLPC, the other is Windows. Can you tell which is which?
I’m sorry, but having had hands on the Sugar-based system for a while now, and having had hands on the OLPC hardware itself for a bit, there’s no question in my mind which is superior as an education tool. Negroponte is right to seek to dissuade Intel fro poisoning the education well with Windows-based systems like Classmate. I’m sure he’d have no objection to different hardware platforms running the OLPC OS–but that’s not what Classmate is.
Having multiple hardware platforms running an education-designed system is a good thing. Feeding Windows machines to kids is a bad thing. All they’d learn on Windows is how to run Office–is that a good thing? Versus learning how to *think* with computer aids, how to collaborate with peers using computer tools, and how to *argue* with computer models?
In re: Jepsen’s departure: Note that the patents on the OLPC screen were assigned *by Jepsen* to the OLPC foundation, so her departure to commercialize this display is clearly done with full knowledge and consent of the OLPC folks. This is a good thing. The screen Jepsen has designed is freaking beautiful; I want one on every device I own.
Cerebus, I don’t deny your points. But it’s a bit difficult to manage XOs in a school environment if your staff is dealing with a lot of Windows machines as well.
Mike, as an XO owner I believe the display is great! But there are problems opening ebook files and especially problems with PDFs. The process for doing so is not intuitive. Also, the buttons on the display don’t really help in tablet mode when reading pdf or web surfing. I think these things are fixable over time. The interface is better suited to reading web pages than binary files (even if you have FBREADER installed).
I expect we’ll discuss this further in greater detail.
One trick by the way is opening up the browser in file:/// so you can browse through the files on the file system.
I also think this is a good thing, and consistent with the original vision of OLPC. The commercialization of this machine, it’s software, or it’s support networks will be its downfall. My guess is that Intel was originally invited in because of its capabilities (to mass produce chips very cheaply), not to support its commercial ambitions.
The XO interface is astounding in it’s simplicity. It is extraordinarily intuitive for young minds. (Older ones like mine have some problems). The fact that is freely available will help this machine stay cheap and accessible.
Contrary to being a threat, I think that Microsoft, Apple, Intel, and other computer manufacturers stand to make some big long term gains as all those young minds reach out for more functionality and accessibility.
As the target for the OLPC is environments where computing resources are lacking to begin with, I think the argument that the OLPC is more difficult to support in an otherwise Windows environment is spurious at best.
In re: the interface, the OLPC is a task metaphor UI, not a document metaphor UI (all desktop-like GUIs such as Windows, OS X, and most Linux systems use are actually document metaphor UIs). Plenty of task metaphor UIs exist in the world–in fact, most things are task metaphor UIs.
The OLPC OS brings a new twist to the task metaphor–the Journal, which is much more than simply a record of task history. It’s also version control, record of collaboration, and a taggable and searchable database of system activity. You want to see that document you worked on last Thursday? Hit the Journal, run back to Thursday, and there it is. Then you can look by activity and see all the times you worked on that document, with who, and investigate all the changes. Very powerful, especially in a school environment; students and teachers have an instant record of things they’re doing. Think, for example, of what you can do for homework management: start a task in class–say, a paper on local insects. Since it’s not finished in class the student can add the due date & the assignment details as Journal metadata, flag it as important, and come back to the Journal later that week and pick it up right where she left off. Wow.
Try that with Windows.
It’s always been interesting to me that the document metaphor has persisted for general computing when time and time again it’s demonstrated that people tend think in tasks–”What am I doing?”–more naturally than in spatial terms–i.e., “Where is what I am doing?”
maybe it takes some getting used to, but I find hunting through the Journal cumbersome. And I find the filter on the right side of it not to be helpful. I think it’s combining too many disparate things into one interface. sometimes complexity is good and necessary.
All the turmoil surrounding OLPC over the past – there will be a commercial version, there won’t be one, they will deal with some supplier, they won’t, they need a minimum 1-million piece order, smaller orders are OK, give-one-get-one starts at this date, no it’s that date, it’s for 2 weeks, it’s for 6 weeks, Intel is evil, MicroSoft is evil, Intel is great and a partner, we are redesigning the XO just for our great pal MicroSoft, Jepson leaves, etc. — all this that we have seen in the Wall Street Journal profile on Mr Negroponte and elsewhere:
has me convinced that Mr Negroponte is a great visionary and promoter of his vision, who is only fairly good as a salesman (he can get interest but can’t close the sale) and a poor manager and hopeless businessman.
I can only hope that Jepson’s departure leads to a shakeup at Laptop.org, and that Mr Negroponte is “promoted” into a position of ‘founder and senior visionary’ and that they get a good, hard-headed, practical businessman manager to actually run things, and that he will have the power to shut Negroponte up and tell him to go sit in a corner and cool off for awhile.
We don’t know what Negroponte’s view of the split with Intel might be. It might be that Intel was telling Negroponte, “If you want our chips you must cut off all contact with AMD,” and Negroponte responded with, “Fine, I will drop AMD if you will drop the ClassmatePC, is it a deal?” And Intel said, “Stick with AMD if you want, and we will bury you just as we promised from the start.”
But even if the above hyopothetical is true, it doesn’t suggest that Negroponte is a shrewd negotiator or able to live with the big boys upon whom, in the end, his dream depends.
Sad, really. The XO is a fantastic realization of the Constructivist dream, and a lot of very talented people, including Jepson and Negroponte, have worked long and hard to make it a reality. Version 2.0 should be the real deal and Intel Silverthorn chips, circa 2009, would be a great addition.
>>>All they’d learn on Windows is how to run Office–is that a good thing?
Well, yes, because once they *leave* the confines of school, they will be confronted with that the majority of the business world uses. They do intend to get jobs, right?
This is not an endorsement of the Classmate, just my attempt to tamper down the XO-as-Xanadu enthusiasm.
Robert, my question was specifically about the screen technology, not how the XO handles ebooks (which I’m sure will be many future posts from the in-love-with-his-XO Rothman). If she intends to commercialize that screen tech, I can immediately think of one company that might want to use it to enter the e-reader fray with their own device: Microsoft. So, is it superior to eInk, David? In what ways and how so?
“Well, yes, because once they *leave* the confines of school, they will be confronted with that the majority of the business world uses. They do intend to get jobs, right?”
Um, no. Education != job training, K? HTH, HAND.
If that’s all you think education is about then you need to go back and get some more. Any nit can be sat in front of a screen and taught MS Word in a few hours, or days at the worst. This is not the school’s job.
Better that they leave school with the skills to learn quickly, efficiently, and independently. THAT is the point of education and you don’t get that from learning Office.