The already beleaguered non-profit has been hit as hard as other charities during the economic crisis, says Negroponte, who said on the OLPC wiki:

Today we are reducing our team by approximately 50% and there will be salary reductions for the remaining 32 people. While we are saddened by this development, we remain firmly committed to our mission of getting laptops to children in developing countries.

The downsizing gives Negroponte an opportunity to more clearly phase out software development on the Sugar Linux interface and platform, he says in order to focus on the double-screened XO2. It's no secret that Negroponte was easing away from Sugar anyway, moving to Windows, so this presents a good excuse.

He also announced that they'd be spinning off the Latin America branch, a move that doesn't exactly build confidence in the organization overall. We certainly hope that Negroponte and his remaining team manages to pull that X02 together, but by the time they do, it may be just a proof-of-concept. [Ars Technica]

Peru is the first country in the world to receive Windows based laptops through the OLPC program

Lima, Peru - September 15, 2008. - Today, José Antonio Chang Escobedo, Peru's Education Minister, announced the agreement between Microsoft and the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). This agreement aims to provide programs such as Windows XP and Office, as well as other educational resources, which will be made available on laptop computers for students. This makes Peru the first country in the world to have XO devices based on Microsoft Windows.

The agreement is part of a nine-month pilot project to integrate educational software, low-cost computing, and technology training into classrooms throughout Peru. This marks a significant milestone as the first Microsoft Windows-based XO deployment in the world, representing the first of ongoing pilots in key markets previously announced by Microsoft and OLPC in May of this year.

"We are extremely excited to take part in this historic educational pilot that will benefit school children throughout Peru," said José Antonio Chang Escobedo, Minister of Education in Peru. "Integrating technology into our school curriculum will help to advance our knowledge economy, improve access to information and will generate opportunities for our students, which, through governmental policies, aims to improve the learning process we are offering our children, as well as closing the digital divide which currently exists between schools in rural and urban areas."

"The world-class software offered through the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite coupled with the training offered through this project provides a powerful and well-supported set of tools to help young people realize their full potential. Along with the Ministry of Education of Peru and OLPC, we are delivering a complete, relevant and affordable educational computing solution to schoolchildren in Peru who will now have the opportunity to experience the benefits that technology can provide. As such, we underline the importance of transforming education as a fundamental goal of Microsoft Unlimited Potential, our ambitious effort to bring sustained social and economic opportunity to people who currently don't enjoy the benefits of technology", outlined Lieneke Schol, Public Sector Lead, Microsoft Multi Country Americas.

"This pilot in Peru represents an important milestone in the evolution of One Laptop per Child," said Charles Kane, President of One Laptop per Child. "It demonstrates our ability to collaborate with Microsoft to provide governments a choice of operating system on the XO laptop."

XO Laptops used in this pilot will come pre-installed with Windows in order to facilitate the OLPC's job of delivering them to the Ministry of Education of Peru, which will then provide them to school age children, to be used for educational purposes. They will be made available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, throughout the useful life of the device and while the child follows through with the school calendar year.

The main advantage of the XOs with Microsoft Windows is that students can learn using a widely recognized universal tool which represents a window to the globalized world.

Offered through Microsoft Unlimited Potential, the Student Innovation Suite is a collection of Microsoft's best education software offerings designed to help implement sustainable technology programs in partnership with governments and non-governmental organizations that benefit students and transform the educational opportunities in their communities. The education suite includes Windows XP Pro, Microsoft Office 2003 Standard, and Learning Essentials 1.0 for Microsoft Office.

The current Classmate PC fits a traditional form-factor and has been moderately successful, if not dominant, in its intended market. Without a truly unique design or an adequately modified (or new) operating system, the first and second generations of the Classmate amounted to little more than a very cheap laptop. Switching to a tablet-style design and relying on nontraditional input methods could push the new Classmate (or whatever this is) over the edge as the de facto digital teaching device for the developing world. That, and a ridiculously low price. In any case, we'll be at tomorrow's IDF keynote when this little tease gets filled out. [Laptop Mag]

To get both operating systems to run, the BIOS has been modified to behave more like standard PCs (rather than Macs or Linux machines). The original BIOS for the XO was originally conceived for AIX and Solaris servers, all running variants of UNIX.

In Windows, the screen flipper and directional pad both work fine, and I'm told by Michail Bletsas, OLPC's connectivity guru, that the camera is also not a problem, as the drivers were available for XP even before they were available for Linux.

You'll note that even sped up 3X what it actually took, Windows still seems a little slow to boot. Michail says it takes a little over a minute for Windows to boot on the XO with 2GB of onboard memory. 2GB of space is needed for Windows XP, though one gets the impression it would do a lot better with 4GB. The machines still have only 256MB of RAM.

And in case you're wondering what that red OLPC is doing in the background, we explained that last Friday. [One Laptop Per Child]

A portable unit of what they've had in hospitals for years, a user simply urinates on the sensor (a la home pregnancy tests) to measure the urine sugar level. Results take roughly six seconds. It's not exactly the same as a blood sugar level, but the measurement should provide correlative evidence as to how much sugar is running rampant in one's blood stream.

The unit will run $154 when it's released. Each sensor cartridge is good for 200 uses and will cost $58 to replace. [TechOn]

With Windows XP already available for the XO on an SD card, the news that future OLPC machines may have Windows XP, with Sugar running on top, may dismay the non-profit brigade. But with no support for the latest versions of Flash—a staple on many educational websites—the XO may not be catering to its supposed target audience.

If Windows XP does become the XO's operating system, then a substantial reworking of the laptop will be in order. Currently just 1GB of internal memory is available, and XP needs around 1.1GB. Sticking a larger SSD inside the machine will just pump up the price, making the XO even further out of reach of those who need it. [ComputerWorld]

After long nights in the lab, probably fuelled by gallons of coke, researchers at Missouri's University of Saint Louis have come up with a sugar-powered fuel cell. The battery, that runs on anything from soft drinks to tree sap, has the potential to run up to four times as long on a single charge than conventional lithium ion batteries, as demonstrated by one of the boffins, who used a battery the size of a postage stamp to run a calculator.

If subsequent testing looks good, then we could be seeing commercialization within five years. But what really amazes me about this story is that the research was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. I'm looking forward to hearing about how meringues will be used in the War on Terror, feeding up Al-Qaeda terrorists with sweet treats until they are too fat to fire an RPG. – Ad Dugdale

Scientists Invent Fuel Cell Powered By Sugar [I4U News]

The One Laptop Per Child project may have turned down Apple's offer of free Mac OS X for each machine in favour of making their own XO interface, but they're not averse to aping the way the Cupertino gang work. At least according to John Maeda, one of the grand poobahs at MIT who has been keeping an eye on the XO development process. "They're using the Steve Jobs method," says, John Maeda, an MIT design guru, "you don't use focus groups. You just do it right." Incidentally, the $100 laptop is now going for about $208 - that was the price when they did a deal with the Libyan authority (sic) back in October. – Ad Dugdale

The Face Of The $100 Laptop [Business Week]

Large corporations can be so greedy. Even though you spend hundreds of dollars on a new gadget to call your very own, they want their name on it!

Instructables posted a tutorial on scraping logos off electronic devices using sugar. You cover the logo with scotch tape and rub the hell out of it with a sugar cube. The results seem perfect, erasing the logo completely while the faux silver finish stays intact. If anyone is unsure about their sugar scraping skills, the tutorial has a video (but it doesn't look much different than it sounds). Now to pull out the old label maker...
– Mark Wilson

Update: I guess you don't cover the logo, but in one picture it looked like he taped over everything.

Tutorial [instructables]