The Great Geek Manual News

A personal plea for cash by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has melted enough hearts to keep the ubiquitous online encyclopedia running for another fiscal year – and then some.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today that it’s raised more than $6.2m since launching a fund-raising campaign in early November. The website exceeded its goal of approximately $6m to fund operations through June 30, 2009, with more than 125,000 donors contributing worldwide.

In late December, the non-profit org appeared to be falling short of its financial target until Wales posted a personal appeal for donations in place of Wikipedia’s standard fund-raising banner. In the remaining eight days of the month, Wikimedia pulled in more than 50,000 contributions totaling $2m, the foundation said.

“You have proven that Wikipedia matters to you, and that you support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising,” Wales wrote in a thank-you message.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The Register

Some might view being knighted for the creation of the World Wide Web as an excuse to accept a cushy tenured chair at a prestigious university and pontificate your way to senility. That approach didn’t appeal to Tim Berners-Lee, who has taken an active role in shepherding the growth and development of his creation. Yesterday, Berners-Lee announced his latest effort in fostering the development of the web, the World Wide Web Foundation, which, based on his earlier organization, is likely to wind up with the monicker W3F. The new foundation is intended to foster open and expanded access to the web, but also has the more nebulous goal of improving the quality of information available through the web.

So far, precise details on the W3F are a bit sparse, with most of the information available coming from a speech by Berners-Lee in which he announced its creation. Seed money for the effort comes from the Knight Foundation, in the form of $1 million a year for five years. According to Berners-Lee, the Knights themselves share many of his overall goals.

Berners-Lee indicated that the W3F would focus on three general goals: advancing a single web that is open to any device and software; extending the capabilities supported by the web and ensuring they can be accessed securely; and extending the reach of the web to everyone on the planet. Some of these appear to be an extension of the W3C, which works to ensure that newly-devised technology conforms to open standards. The difference appears to be that the W3F will be a bit more proactive, and will research and promote technologies before handing them off to be standardized.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Ars Technica

Yesterday, in a long-expected but controversial move, officials of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project announced that their green-and-white machines, designed for children in developing countries, would run Microsoft Windows as well as the project’s novel Linux-based interface. In an interview two weeks ago, the project’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte, said that the move was necessary to enable the mass global acceptance of the machine, something he had long predicted.

OLPC’s laptop will be available in a “dual-boot” configuration, with customers able to choose either operating system. “The people who make decisions on what to buy are not the kids,” Negroponte said. “They are ministers and executives. They are very comfortable with a laptop that they know. The fact that the machine can do both is a huge advantage. Plus, you have a huge developer community that does software that works on Windows.”

The decision adds cost to the laptop. To carry a second operating system, the machine will require more memory, which will cost an extra $7, even if Windows is never booted up. And any government that does choose to boot up Windows will pay Microsoft an additional $3 per machine in licensing fees. For those using Windows, the final cost will be $198, up from today’s $188. (The costs will be higher for five unnamed countries in which Windows-ready machines will receive a trial run. For those machines, an extra memory drive was added at a cost of about $20.)

The move to adopt Windows is the latest twist in the sometimes turbulent story of the project. OLPC is a nonprofit organization founded in 2005 by Negroponte and others from MIT’s Media Lab, with the goal of building a laptop computer that was rugged, usable, and inexpensive enough to reach millions of poor children in the developing world. As recently as 2006, Negroponte was predicting sales of more than 100 million machines by this year. But OLPC’s flagship XO machine has not caught fire in the global marketplace. So far, about 500,000 machines have been delivered, mostly to Uruguay and Peru.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Technology Review

In an emerging effort called UNIWIKI, UNICEF is now using technologies ranging from open source software to SMS text messaging for helping young people from throughout the world to communicate via international social networking sites.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - To broaden out access to more geographic areas, communications are taking place not just via PCs but also through mobile phones and radios, according to UNICEF’s Terra Weikel, speaking at the UN in New York this afternoon.

In a UNIWIKI project known as Connecting Classrooms, students in New York City and Uganda are now sharing perspectives on their own societies, cultures, and politics with each other over the Web.

In another project, displaced children from Iraq are taking part in distance learning through a “collaborative workspace” on the Internet, Weikel said today, in a talk at a UN conference entitled “United Nations Meets Web 2.0 and ICT Entrepreneurs.”

For the Iraqi project, open source developers in Cairo built an Arab-language Web site for UNICEF. Meanwhile, in Our Stories — an effort conducted by UNICEF in conjunction with Google and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) — UNICEF is collecting and storing five million stories from youth around the world. The stories, which are being recorded in audio on location, are organized into topic areas.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Beta News

Three online giants are now working together on Open Social, an open online platform for social networking. It is the first major joint project for Yahoo since its torrid acquisition attempt by Microsoft.

The Open Social initiative was created by Google back in November, with the goal of making an easily accessible set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for social networking, thereby having a more even playing field for everyone.

Google signed on Myspace right away. The addition of Yahoo in the team gives it a significantly bigger boost.

“Yahoo believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the Web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Yahoo VP Wade Chambers in a statement.

Google product manager Dan Peterson wrote in the company’s official blog that Yahoo signing on will bring additional resources for developers, and will encourage others to come on board.

Google’s Joe Kraus said in a conference call today that over 200 million users would be reached by the Open Social program. The program will be community-governed and open to any developer that wants in.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Tom’s Hardware

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation today announced it is awarding $3 million of support to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which operates the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The money will support Wikimedia’s organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services.

“We are extremely grateful for this support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikipedia and its sister projects have an enormous global impact, but the organization behind them has been operating on a shoestring: unable to pursue partnerships, execute projects, or even to effectively fundraise. This institutional support from Sloan will enable us to make progress on some key goals: increasing quality, broadening participation, and distributing free knowledge to people without Internet connectivity.”

“We are delighted to support the Wikimedia Foundation and to help develop its organizational capacity and improve the quality of its flagship, Wikipedia,” said Doron Weber, Sloan Program Director for Universal Access to Recorded Knowledge. “As the largest encyclopedia in human history and one of the top ten web sites in the world, Wikipedia represents a quantum leap in collecting human knowledge from diverse sources, organizing it without commercial or other bias, and making it freely available to people everywhere.”

The funding will be received over three years, at 1 million dollars per year.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Soft32

There’s little doubt that anyone with the time and the inclination can overhaul at least a few Wikipedia entires to suit their personal ambitions. All they need is the right friends. Or a little pillow talk. The question is, could someone overhaul the entire encyclopedia?

Over the past two years, one man has donated more than $1.35m to the charitable organization that runs Wikipedia, dwarfing the contributions of any other donor. And this man is among Silicon Valley’s most conspicuous venture capitalists.

His name is Roger McNamee, and he runs Elevation Partners, a San Francisco-based VC firm whose partners include Bono, the U2 frontman more famous for pop records than venture capital. In fact, Bono played a significant role in the mysterious pas de deux between Elevation and the Wikimedia Foundation, making nice with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales and his wife Christine before a U2 concert in Mexico City more than two years ago.

In the beginning, McNamee’s donations were made anonymously - at least on official records. But the Elevation Partners connection has long been an open secret among Wikimedia insiders, and last week the secret spilled out onto the web when former Foundation executive Danny Wool posted a few details to his well-read blog.

After Jimmy Wales dumped his lover on the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit”, and Danny Wool accused the site’s Spiritual Leader of mismanaging Foundation funds, many assumed that the The Great Wikipedia Soap Opera had reached its climax. But there’s more to come.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The Register

A lack of “big thinking” by politicians has stifled a scheme to distribute laptops to children in the developing world, a spokesman has said.

Walter Bender of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) said politicians were unwilling to commit because “change equals risk”.

But, he said, there needed to be a “dramatic change” because education in many countries was “failing” children.

In an interview with the BBC, Nigeria’s education minister questioned the need for laptops in poorly equipped schools.

Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: “What is the sense of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don’t have seats to sit down and learn; when they don’t have uniforms to go to school in, where they don’t have facilities?”

“We are more interested in laying a very solid foundation for quality education which will be efficient, effective, accessible and affordable.”

The previous government of Nigeria had committed to buying one million laptops.

Dr Aja-Nwachuku said he was now assessing OLPC alongside other schemes from Microsoft and Intel.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The BBC

The success of the OLPC’s Give One Get One (G1G1) laptop promotion — where buyers purchase two OLPC laptops at once, one for personal use and one for a child in a developing nation — comes at a challenging time for OLPC and its dream of getting millions of the OLPC laptops into the hands of the world’s poorest children.

It’s the season for giving and getting, and a good time for the One Laptop Per Child’s Give One Get One program. Because of reported sales averaging $2 million per day, OLPC announced late last week that the G1G1 program is being extended through the end of this year.

In mid-November, the nonprofit OLPC launched what was then described as a limited, two-week program for individuals in the U.S. and Canada to buy two of its XO laptops. The buyer gets one, and the other is donated to a child in a developing country, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia, or Rwanda.

Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC’s founder and chairman, said in a statement that the public response to the program has been “truly gratifying and encouraging.” He added that the G1G1 program will transition in the new year to “a program of giving only.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: News Factor

With the OLPC facing production delays and implementing new donation plans, the OLPC is “waking up to the realization” that Nicholas Negroponte’s original idea of selling millions of laptops to developing governments has failed, said Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News. “They really need to start at the grass roots and work up,” he added.

The One Laptop Per Child project was supposed to start production in October, but due to “last-minute bugs,” the bulk of production has been delayed until November 12. That means the project will have trouble delivering laptops to children in Uruguay and Peru, the only countries that have ordered the machines so far, in time for kids to use them over their summer vacation.

And while OLPC still plans to offer the laptops for sale November 12 to 26 to individuals in the U.S. and Canada under its Give One, Get One sales effort, it’s now quite uncertain when those machines will be delivered. Under that program, Westerners would buy two machines — one for a child in the developing world and one to keep. If consumers don’t know when they’ll receive laptops, they might be less interested in participating.

Wayan Vota, editor of OLPC News, said that people should still participate in the program. “What I really hope is that they will be able to deliver laptops to Uruguay and Peru,” he said in a telephone interview. Those countries have already ordered the laptops. “They need them. I would be happy to get mine in February or March if the ‘give-one’ laptop goes to kids today.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: News Factor

One reason things may have gone slower than predicted for the One Laptop Per Child XO rollout is that the impending emergence awoke commercial vendors to the promise of a low-cost international educational market. Now governments considering buying XOs for their youngsters have multiple options in the $200 range.

The project that hopes to supply developing-world schoolchildren with $188 laptops will sell the rugged little computers to U.S. residents and Canadians for $400 each, with the profit going toward a machine for a poor country.

The One Laptop Per Child project expects that its “Give One, Get One” promotion will result in a pool of thousands of donated laptops that will stimulate demand in countries hesitant to join the program. It will be offered for only two weeks in November.

Originally conceived as the “$100 laptop Relevant Products/Services,” the funky green-and-white low-power “XO” computers now cost $188. The laptops’ manufacturer, Quanta Computer Inc., is beginning mass production next month, but with far fewer than the 3 million orders One Laptop Per Child director Nicholas Negroponte had said he was waiting for.

Negroponte said the availability of donated laptops would not be the sole condition for many countries weighing whether to place multimillion-dollar orders. But “it just triggers it,” he said. “It makes it all happen faster.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: News Factor

Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production.

Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

Previously, the organisation behind the scheme said that it required orders for 3m laptops to make production viable.

The first machines should be ready to put into the hands of children in developing countries in October 2007.

“There’s still some software to write, but this is a big step for us,” Walter Bender, head of software development at One Laptop per Child (OLPC), told the BBC News website. 3

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The BBC

Blizzard made life for one child with a life threatening brain tumor a lot happier by granting his ultimate World of Warcraft wish, a game he had come to love while playing it with his father.

10-year old Ezra Chatterton was transported to Blizzard’s development offices where he got to spend a day with the WoW creative staff. There he spent time with game designer Jeff Kaplan where they worked on the creation of a new legendary flame-shooting crossbow, a new character (Ahab Wheathoof), and quest. Ezra was even allowed to add his own dog, named Kyle, to the quest the company was working on. In addition, the staff took Ezra to the recording studio to record his voice to add to the new character Ahab Wheathoof. If that wasn’t cool enough, the Blizzard staff then bumped up his personal character to L70, gave him tons of gold, and fitted him with the best equipment. Blizzard then allowed him temporary GM abilities.

Ezra had a thrilling day with the Blizzard development staff and even plans to become a developer and play tester for the company some day. Lots of kudos to Blizzard for doing such a thoughtful gesture, and to Ezra and his family, we wish you all the best.

Source: WoW Insider via Geek News

The backers of the One Laptop Per Child project are looking at the possibility of selling the machine to the public. One idea would be for customers to have to buy two laptops at once - with the second going to the developing world.
Five million of the laptops will be delivered to developing nations this summer, in one of the most ambitious educational exercises ever undertaken. Michalis Bletsas, chief connectivity officer for the project, said eBay could be a partner to sell the laptop.

“If we started selling the laptop now, we would do very good business,” Mr Bletsas, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show, told BBC News. “But our focus right now is on the launch in the developing world.”

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the OLPC group, emphasized that the launch to the poorest parts of the world was the organisation’s main task. Of plans to sell the machine, he said: “Many commercial schemes have been considered and proposed that may surface in 2008 or beyond, one of which is ‘buy 2 and get 1′.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: The BBC