MS-OLPC?

Nicholas Negroponte just posted the following announcement:

"One Laptop per Child is announcing an agreement with Microsoft
to make a dual boot, Linux/Windows, version of the XO laptop. In addition, our intention is to engage one or more third parties to port Sugar to run on Windows in order to reach a wider installed base of laptops. In the meanwhile, OLPC remains fully committed to our goal: a completely free and open learning platform for the world's children. The mission statement of OLPC has not changed in three years.

Sugar is the first user interface specifically designed for children and teachers to learn and collaborate, and remains central to our strategy. Broadening Sugar's reach to as many children as possible remains key to OLPC's mission.

To enable the Sugar environment to reach as many children as possible, particularly in the poorest areas of the world, OLPC must be able to bid on educational technology contracts, some of which require that Microsoft Windows be able to run on our hardware. The increased volumes will lower the XO-1's price, already lowest in the industry with capabilities no other laptop shares.

OLPC is substantially increasing its engineering resources and all software development continues entirely on GNU/Linux. We will continue to work to make Sugar on Linux the best possible platform for education and to invest in our expanding Linux deployments in Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and elsewhere.

No OLPC resources are going to porting Sugar to Microsoft Windows, although as a free software project, we encourage others to do so. The Sugar user interface is already available for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions, greatly broadening Sugar's reach to the millions of existing Linux systems. We continue to solicit help from the free software community in these efforts. Additionally, the Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu software environments run on the XO-1, adding support for tens of thousands of free software applications.

Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems, and was developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed. With this "free BIOS," the XO-1 continues to be the most open laptop hardware currently
available."

For more information, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AnnounceFAQ.

Machinimascope

Gamecaster is a new company that has developed a way to let you shoot 3D animation as if it were live action. This specialized capture technology called the Cybercam S3 was developed for use during broadcasts of video game competitions for sports games like Madden football and numerous combat titles. Using this device, camera operators are able to smoothly pan, tilt, truck, crane, and even zoom the camera lens within 3D virtual worlds in realtime.

Machinima 101

An introductory lesson about the video production technique known as machinima. The lesson was filmed entirely on location within the virtual world of San Andreas and was nominated for a Machinima Award at the 2007 Bitfilm Festival.

Googley Eye

Not that far from the truth.

Another Digital Rainout

Today, for the second time in as many weeks, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened, once again, just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was trying to host a Second Life in-world meeting. Here is what Linden Lab had to say: Logins have temporarily been restricted to staff-only as Operations addresses a slowdown in the asset system. We’ve also broadcast a request in world for residents who are currently logged in to refrain from manipulating or transferring assets. We’ll have more info ASAP. Obviously, this company is in real trouble given the frequency of these problems in a system that so many have come to rely on....

More freeCAD in Croquet

A video of additional features being added to the freeCAD port to Croquet. This work is being done by Aik-Siong Koh and his students at Malaysia's Multimedia University. A tree view menu (to the left of the screen) presents a list of all the objects in the space and a specialized tool bar (to the right of the screen) allows objects to be scaled and rotated. Once the code for these features is cleaned up a bit more in the next weeks, it will be incorporated into Cobalt as enhanced functionality.

FreeCAD in Croquet

Aik-Siong Koh and other Malaysian programmers are developing an in-world 3D modeling tool for Croquet. As a first step, they are porting freeCAD into Croquet. freeCAD is a basic 3D CAD with advanced motion simulation capabilities. freeCAD was developed as a tool for teaching and learning geometry, kinematics, dynamics, vibrations, mechanisms, linkages, cams, machine design and physics. It offers users the ability to create and manipulate assemblies of simple 3D solids that can be connected by joints, constraints, contacts, motors, actuators, springs, dampers, forces, torques or gravity.

Since freeCAD is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk and OpenGL, Aik-Siong considered it to be a logical choice for developing a native CAD for Croquet. His first step is to duplicate all the capabilities of freeCAD inside Croquet. Following that, he and his team plan to develop a GUI to take advantage of the solid modeling and NURBS capabilities inside freeCAD. Ultimately, Aik-Siong and his colleagues hope that their port can enable the default in-world content creation tool for Croquet.