Tech Presentations

Thanks to Bill Clementson, I found out that I missed another OLPC technology presentation that was given by Ivan Krstić at Google Tech Talk.

Ivan talks about various interesting things in OLPC including their own approach to power management that reduced suspend time from 15 seconds (regular computers) to ~233 milliseconds (at the moment of presentation), file system with object store and unusual security requirements.

He also describes “View Source” button on keyboard - probably the first Open Source promotional tool of the kind.

See presentation on TechPresentations.org: One Laptop Per Child (Google Talk)

P.S. OLPC is running Give 1 Get 1 initiative that allows anyone to donate laptop to a child in development country and in return, get one for yourself. It just costs $400 for two laptops. Currently limited to US & Canada, but there are ways to get it elsewhere.

Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007 about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project given on Saturday February 24^th, 2007 (video, ogg, 246Mb).

This is interesting video from both hardware/software and social perspectives. And when I’m saying social, I don’t only mean charity point of view, which is important for us to always keep in mind, but also it’s important to understand that social aspects of such projects can be very important factors in defining technical side of things.

At the very end of the speech, Jim is saying thank you to all Open Source developers for their work over many years without which OLPC would not be possible. And in my view, that’s a side of Open Source that is quite often forgotten behind the hype of free (as beer) software or killing Microsoft dominance - it’s about greater good that this movement is bringing to the world, next step in evolution of thinking.