Walter Bender Resigns From OLPC

westlake writes "Walter Bender, the former executive director of MIT's Media Lab, and, in many ways, the tireless workhorse and public face of OLPC, has resigned from OLPC after being reorganized and sidetracked into insignificance. The rumor mill would have it that 'constructionism as children [learn] learning' is being replaced by a much less romantic view of the XO's place in the classroom and XO's tech in the marketplace."

oblig

Did his final words as he left have anything to do with biting his shiny metal ass?

Re:oblig

with biting his shiny metal ass?

nah, but: 'i'll make my own OLPC ... with blackjack ... and hookers.'

Re:

nah, but: 'i'll make my own OLPC ... with blackjack ... and hookers.'

In fact forget the OLPC, and the blackjack.

Re:oblig

antiquing?

Re:No, nor XP.

This would merit the moderation if not for the fact that this account is one of your seven sockpuppets [slashdot.org]. You even created one so you could insult [slashdot.org] me.

BS yes, but whose?

Nowhere in his exit statement does Bender contradict the rumors about him being forced out. Instead he gives the standard "leaving to pursue other interests". This is a conventional explanation people give to avoid antagonizing their former colleagues. Thi

Why am I getting a strange feeling...

That now that OLPC is no longer a threat that all of the other vendors of small low cost laptops will simply stop offering them... Just a thought... :)

Re:Why am I getting a strange feeling...

That now that OLPC is no longer a threat that all of the other vendors of small low cost laptops will simply stop offering them... Just a thought... :)

Asus is doing very well with its flagship offering.
The people who don't get it right may stop offering small lappies, but at last there is a small, uncrippled (unlike I-Openers etc) flash drive computer in a very convenient form-factor.
OLPC may die out, but their business model isn't our problem. Asus proved that running a real desktop OS in that package is what consumers want as opposed to deliberately crippled equipment running crippled operating systems. Crippling gives "product differentiation", but it still leaves a gap. Asus just exploited that gap.

It looks

like Bender was kind of forced to resign since all of his responsibilities were absorbed into the other 4 restructured areas. Since January the OLPC has lost three top execs, one of whom was asked to stop collaborating with Bender. Something seems a little fishy with this operation now.

In an interview with BusinessWeek in early March, OLPC Chairman Negroponte said OLPC was "doing almost impossible things," and that the organization needed to be managed "more like Microsoft." He said OLPC was reorganizing into four departments and looking for a CEO to lead the nonprofit.

Related to Ivan Krstic's resignation

It was the demotion of Bender that prompted Ivan Krstic' to resign [radian.org] last month, so the damage to OLPC by their stupid demotion of Bender is not limited to just the loss of him. I wonder if anyone else will be leaving over this?

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krstic is not a loss to OLPC; I worked there for 2 years and Ivan was nothing but an egotistical brat who never showed up for meetings where he was supposed to present code he'd written, because he never actually wrote more than 500 lines of code and inste

Direct Link to Resignation letter

Direct Link to Resignation letter [laptop.org]

I was going to submit this story after finding it on Digg or Reddit; the headline was focusing on Negreponte(sp?) allegedly wishing to partner with MS to put XP on XO in order to sell more units. After reading the letter and there being no mention of it I decided against submission.

Bender Was Quoted...

... "bite my rubberized, lime-green ass."

Sadly, no...

The software stack may be questionable, but the hardware is brilliant.

Nothing else comes close for efficiency, cost, battery life (with working software), ruggedness, total lifetime, etc.

The thing is VERY tough (i've tossed mine several times), very low power (3 hours battery life with 100% broken power management. Good power management should get 6+ hours battery life for typical users), with a brilliant screen. Just put real software on it and its very nice.

Let alone the environmental tolerance: Normal notebook batteries die if you try charging them at 100F.

Re:Sadly, no...

The software stack may be questionable, but the hardware is brilliant.

The software stack is actually very cool and innovative. Unfortunately, it is also way too ambitious for the distribution timeline that OLPC has. It tries to reinvent the filesystem and all the standard WIMP GUI conventions, even while implementing everything in *Python*. On top of that, almost every element of the software stack (browser, word processor, etc.) is either implemented from scratch, or re-implemented in Python on top of a low-level branch of FOSS code like gecko or AbiWord.

Sugar is a worthwhile project. Unfortunately, it is not yet stable (memory leaks, etc), the kinks of the completely re-imagined user experience have not been worked out, and not every "activity" that is needed to provide a complete user experience exists.

I hope that Sugar is not dead, because when that thing actually starts working...(famous last words?) More importantly, I hope that OLPC makes some very clear and unambiguous statements regarding the future and the status of Sugar, because it needs a strong developer community to survive, and I sure as hell am not going to write anything for it if it is completely abandoned. What a waste it would be, after so much good work.

Re:Sadly, no...

I was reasonably impressed with the hardware. Had to cram some folded paper into the battery compartment to stop the rattling, but other than that the construction seemed solid. The keyboard is mushy, though, and probably the most annoying I've used since the Timex Sinclair 1000.

I've had the touch pad start freaking out in odd ways, with the pointer randomly jumping when I lift my finger to reposition it.

The screen is very impressive, especially for the cost. The camera is surprisingly good. The software is, IMHO, a steaming pile of crap in its current state, wholly unsuitable for its target audience. It's slow to load, simple operations like exiting programs are inconsistent between applications, and there seems to be little to no built-in help.

Both of my kids (ages 9 and 12) gave up on using it. My daughter (the 9-year-old) much prefers her old Gateway P2-550 laptop running Windows 2000, despite the machine being an ancient cast-off that ceased being a useful business computer several years ago. Firefox on that machine is vastly superior to the XO-1's browser, and the overall experience is much less frustrating.

Despite my doubts about the OLPC project from the beginning, I've WANTED it to succeed, and I still hope to see it succeed. I want to believe that the open source community can build something that will make a real difference in the developing world, but it looks like there's still a long way to go.

Actually...

A: The x86 used is already very low power and very high integration, supporting sub-millisecond sleep states. With Amdahl's law being what it is, replacing the processor with a mystic 0 power CPU wouldn't add all that much to battery life. The TOTAL power consumption is 5W already, and the CPU's share of that power budget (when you consider CPU and not the associated control logic for memory, IO, etc) is low.

And in return, x86 compatibility is a good thing, because it opens up a huge world of binary software. For one, x86 is far better supported by just about everybody.

B: The OLPC actually uses a 15 W-Hr LiFeP (Lithium Ferro-Polymer) battery. Which is actually 4x the charge lifespan of LiIon, and has far greater environmental tolerance, and can even be composted for disposal.

Re:

BWAHAHAHAHA!

I am writing this response on one of those laptops, running prerelease Ubuntu Hardy that I have just configured for it.

This laptop is not going to do any 3D modeling or video editing any soon, but for everything that belongs in a classroom it's

Re:

From a romantic standpoint, less business is a GOOD thing.

Re:

Not if your customer is the governor of NY.

Re:Instead OLPC should deepen its approch

But first you have to learn the teachers how to teach to teach teaching.

My brain hurts.

Re:GOOD...

There were rumors posted at one point that Apple had offered to donate a core OS, but were turned down for not being completely open-source. Perhaps if those rumors had any truth, they could be fulfilled now.

I hope not. Look I'm as big of an OS X fan as anyone, but it is not really suited to the OLPC project in a number of ways. Also, the all OSS stack makes sense with regard to their mission, to bootstrap an intellectual property creation industry in these nations. Being able to edit and modify all the code provides a starting place for this project to sustain itself via the user base.

I'd sure rather have MacOS than linux or XP, given the choice, if I was a third world kid who wanted to learn something.

The OLPC software is very well designed for its core tasks of educating children, which is quite different from general purpose computing. As a kid, I'd much rather have had an OLPC that allows me to learn with all the other kids in my school, than even a modern OS X system. Swapping it out for OS X makes little more sense than doing the same with WinXP.

Re:GOOD...

being that I am not well-informed on the subject of educational pedagogy, I really can't say how well the software actually achieves its core tasks

All too often those who claim proficiency in pedagogy are merely hiding their lack of brilliance behind a stack of journal articles and study results. I draw inspiration from Shin'ichi Suzuki, founder of Talent Education, who with no formal training in education single-handedly created one of the most successfull methods of teaching music to children. Back in the 70s Suzuki was widely criticized by American violin pedagogues who denounced him as a crackpot. The Suzuki method was built on a common sense view of learning which begins with this observation: children naturally learn their mother tongue without the help of experts. Therefore, children know how to learn, and mothers are the best teachers.

Now apply that view to homeschooling and an interesting picture develops. Parents are fully qualified to teach young children. As children get older they benefit from subject matter experts, but it does not require a brick-and-morter school to provide them. K-12 teachers complain about the lack of parent involvement, especially as the children get older. With homeschoolers, the parent is always involved.

how does that mesh with a core learning curriculum based on The Three R's?

Hold on, there! Who says education has a core of three R's? Or a core of anything? This is just pedagogical pablum passed along year after year as if it were inscribed in stone by the almighty himself. Stringing together Python scripts could very well be much more relavent to today's children.

Re:GOOD...

It may be exciting for students to hack together small Python scripts in Pippy or have a collaborative jam session in TamTam, but how does that mesh with a core learning curriculum based on The Three R's?

Children are small humans (shocking but true) and humans learn best when they are involved with something with which they are interested. Computers are useful for this sort of thing because they are applicable to basically everything.

Here's a simple truth for you: Those who are able to manipulate information have an edge over those who do not. For instance I can make my own vector maps instead of paying for them; I can also get my own information on the nutritive value of foods instead of buying a carb counter book simply by downloading a freely available government database.

I was in a GATE program in elementary school and they told me I could not participate in astronomy because I was too young. Today I am a math idiot. Perhaps if instead of quashing my enthusiasm, they had presented me with mathematics related to something I was interested in, I would be more comfortable with it today? Unfortunately, even so-called "Gifted and Talented" programs are really just a means to "deal with" "problem children" (I was disruptive because I was bored) and to park them somewhere.

What I'm trying to say is that presenting children with the maximum number of options is critical. Lots of the functionality on the system isn't necessary for all purposes. You have the option to not use it all. Meanwhile, including it may be what gets one more child interested in something that saves our collective bacon. You never know.

Re:

And how does making them dependent on a foreign company for any computer-related job (which, by the time they are grown up is likely to mean pretty much any job) helping them? Phase two of the project aims to have the countries that bought the first gener