Charbax.com

I am filming many of the videos at http://radikale.tv which is my contribution to the Radical Left party´s campaign in Denmark. The election day is on the 13th of November and the campaign has been going on for a week now.

The One Laptop Per Child is the most awesome technological revolution in the works and its mass production is just about to start in China.

There is the Buy 1, Get 1 program and the Give Many programs that are also just about to launch while OLPC will deliver the laptops in priority to Uruguay, Peru and other countries that have confirmed orders for large quantities of it. The goal being that as many children as possible should get laptops as soon as possible.

Jepsen says it’s true, as the story suggested, that final assembly of the first batch of mass-produced laptop—to begin soon at a recently expanded Quanta Computer factory in Changshu, northwest of Shanghai—was originally envisioned to begin in October, and will now start sometime in November. But neither the One Laptop organization nor Quanta ever claimed that production would be begin on a set day—so it’s a stretch to call the situation a “production delay.” Says Jepsen, “I think we had hoped to start mass production in October, but we were never focused on starting on a certain date. We’ve always just wanted to make the product as good as we can…I am certainly not aware of any promises that we are going to miss.”

And while Jepsen says she’s happy that audiences are so interested in the details of the One Laptop project, she points out that the One Laptop organization doesn’t work like a traditional manufacturing company, with detailed business plans or Gantt charts showing the dependencies between each part of the project. “It’s much looser and more collaborative, kind of in the spirit of the open-source movement—and yet I’ve never worked at a company where things have come together more smoothly,” she says. “Everyone thought this was impossible three years ago.”

(…)

“What is mass production, anyway?” asks Jepsen. “Is it when you put together the motherboards, or is it when the operators on the line screw together the plastic parts on a conveyor belt? You can say that that’s when it really becomes a laptop—but we designed it so that five-year-old kids in Nigeria can screw it together. In a way, the work is already largely done.” Jepsen points out that Quanta, the world’s largest laptop manufacturer, recently doubled the size of its Changshu manufacturing plant so that it could begin production of the XO-1, which will be the first product off the new lines.

Jepsen says she was surprised by the complaining tone that spread across the blogosphere yesterday in response to the Reuters story about the supposed delays. “On some level I’d just like to say to everyone, ‘Chill,’” she says. “But on the other hand, it’s clear that people are really interested in the process, and in learning about how a laptop is manufactured.”

Source: http://xconomy.com/2007/10/25/one-laptop-organization-to-world-chill/

FON is awesome, I installed it at my home and I have nabours connecting to it, and some of them pay so as I get 50% I’ve been paid about 50€ in the past few months. I haven’t freely connected yet to many other FON hotspots though, but this might change soon.

FON has signed deals with some huge ISPs around the world such as BT in the UK, Neuf in France and Time Warner Cable in the USA. All of those ISPs have millions of Wi-Fi enabled routers out there, customized firmware updates are being pushed out and installed onto all those routers and customers are then able to activate FON by simply clicking “Yes” on a special webpage.

Not everything about the recently announce BT deal in the UK has been announced, such as BT became an investor in FON and exactly how FON and BT are going to share revenue from BT FONspots. This is how I think that the revenue sharing could happen:

- FON could leave the largest part of the revenue from Aliens onto the ISPs, since it is the ISPs hardware, thus the ISPs network.

- It would be up to the ISP to decide if they want to provide access to worldwide Foneros onto their private WiFi networks which aren’t actual people sharing their own WiFi to get access to FONspots worldwide. ISP’s may possibly provide a discount or special roaming service for FONeros, so very active FONeros meaning that they have a very active FONspot would be able to roam for cheaper on those private WiFi networks, such as the BT OpenZone network.

- The main point being the FONeros get free access to those new FONspots and those new FONspot providers instanly have free access to all the FONspots worldwide.

This probably means that FON will soon announce they will have signed with other large ISPs in other countries, and maybe hopefully even find a way to have different ISPs in the same country agree that both become compatible with each other using FON as the WiFi sharing standard. Thus in France I hope one day all of Neuf, Orange and Free would agree to all install FON on their routers and maybe internally provide some different roaming agreements depending on the quality of the FONspots that everyone adds into the mix. With such ISP agreements, FON is about to cover the whole planet with WiFi, at least all the densely populated parts of the planet, the rest would probably be covered with WiMax.