Busy OLPC Week

No, sadly, not busy in the sense of me playing with my XO. I'm still waiting. But I know I'm not alone, so its ok.

There were three big news items recently:

1. Mary Lou Jepsen has left to branch out into her own for-profit company, Pixel Qi. From what I've ready, she was the main figure in many of the awesome technical features of the XO.
2. The split with Intel, after only a few short months together.
3. Microsoft working on getting XP to work on the XO.

I'm not authoritatively familiar with any of these aspects. There must be some remorse in losing Mary Lou Jepsen, but it sounds like she plans on keeping on doing good things, and helping out OLPC in the process. So that's ok. As far as the split with Intel goes, we're supposed to believe competition is good. It seems to me that Intel can generate some pretty stiff competition, and I wouldn't be surprised if it lead to some new distribution models for OLPC. Especially as this seems to be the main issue soo far. Finally, Microsoft's plans... well, I'm not a fan. But then, I can't imagine wanting to run XP on this thing, so with any luck they'll be investing this time and energy and not end up with much to show for it. Time will tell. I do find it humorous that the XO comes with a 1GB drive, and that's enough room for the OS and space to work, but that Microsoft is apparently working very hard to get their stuff down to 2GB (to fit on an external flash drive).