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As for OLPC, I doubt they want to slow the project -- they want to make the pie bigger and OLPC will help them do that.

Now see, there's your mistake: You're thinking about this reasonably.

Microsoft absolutely do want to slow the OLPC project. Bill Gates has as much as said that he thinks it's crap and that people should instead consider his masterful plan to provide an over-powered mobile phone that plugs into a TV, instead. The fact that the phone costs USD 600-1000, requires mains power, an external keyboard, mouse and television doesn't seem to be a problem for him.

Microsoft is not the only company attempting to pour water on the OLPC project, by the way. Even more shameful behaviour is being shown by HP and its proxies. Check out the 'concern' website OLPC News. It's written in true Fox News style, with false objectivity and vocabulary weighted to cast aspersions without regard to the factual content of the article. And last I checked, the author of all this concern did not once admit that he was involved in the management of HP's Classmate PC project, designed explicitly as a response to OLPC.

Make no mistake - the business world does not like OLPC, and they will do what it takes to stop it. And for me, that's as good a reason to support it as any. 8^)

I think it's been said a thousand times already, but I'll say it a thousand and one times: The target for the OLPC is not "the goat farmer in Kenya".

It's a middle ground, like the average child in my country (Uruguay) whose family makes U$ 4.000/year, we have a 99% literacy rate (better than the US) and 500.000 Internet users out of 3.000.000 inhabitants, but most of those have to go to cyber-cafés for computer usage (which charge 50c/hour, and are very popular among children and teenagers).

Uruguay has already commited to buy 50 million dollars in laptops and expects to buy even more:

http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/uruguay_ olpc.html

For now, it is quite common for families to buy used/refurbished desktops for 120 U$D in several installments.

Hmmm... well, Murtha and Pelosi aside (I'll just say I disagree - cut n' run v. stay for eternity) - but I really think it would be very nice to have a computer that can run without power (via the hand crank). If it doesn't have that I probably won't get one.

http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/power_supply/ - I like the fact (if this is the case) that they are using LiFePO4 batteries - these also last a lot longer that the current Lithium-ion batteries.

The New York Times article explains why SimCity is one of the ten most important video games of all time:

SimCity helped establish the genre known as god games, in which players take on an omnipotent role, controlling the game world rather than simply participating in it. It also broke convention by refusing to establish criteria for winning, leaving the decision of what constituted success up to the player.

SimCity was selected by Mr. Bittanti, a researcher at the Humanities Lab at Stanford who works with Mr. Lowood. The game is "one of the most important art works of the 20th century," Mr. Bittanti said, adding: "It completely reinvented the whole notion of games. And then it transcended the game world to become a cultural phenomenon."

SimCity and its four follow-ups have sold 17 million copies, and the franchise it spawned, the Sims, has sold 85 million copies.

SimCity exemplifies Seymour Papert's ideas about Constructionist Learning:

Constructionism (in the context of learning) is inspired by constructivist theories of learning that propose that learning is an active process wherein learners are actively constructing mental models and theories of the world around them. Constructionism hold that learning can happen felicitously when people are actively making things in the real world. Constructionism is connected with experiential learning and builds on some of the ideas of Jean Piaget.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is based on Seymour Papert's ideas about Learning Learning by fun immersive play, and his experience teaching the Logo programming language to elementary school students: Constructionist Learning and Constructivism are central to the goals of the OLPC.

At the Game Developer's Conference, SJ Klein (Director of Content for the One Laptop Per Child project) gave the keynote address at the Serious Games Summit. He explained the philosophy behind the project, and asked developers to join in the project to develop a game platform, games, tools and courseware to distribute to classrooms and homes of some two billion children across the globe.

SJ Klein said: "Existing games are nice, and cute," but games for things like learning language are the "gem they're targeting." Most importantly, Klein said in a direct plea to the serious game developers in front of him, the project needed frameworks and scripting environments -- tools with which children themselves could create their own content.

-Don

I still want one bad. I want them to sell them to geeks like us. I've thought of a few ideas on that front:

• Overcharging to help pay for them for other countries or invest in more production
• Make them a different color so it is obvious that they were purchased for individuals and not by a government
• Sell lower power ones to us so software we write or help develop HAS to be nimble to run on our machines and so it will run even better on the real OLPCs

My only hope that I know of right now is a contest to design a game for them in which you can win an OLPC.

I really want one. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it...

Can't wait to see what kind of cool things people do with these little laptops.

I am sick too, similar situation. Sorry.

I just really care about this project, it means a lot to me and I believe in it. I guess I get really defensive about all the FUD being spread about it. Here's an example of a website set up as a FUD/astroturfing thing whose purpose is to make people see the OLPC as a very bad thing:

http://olpcnews.com/

You see enough of this crap and then you start to get kind of upset (at least, I do). I don't know who hired that guy, for instance, but they really ought to be ashamed.

...like PLAY DOOM! http://www.olpcnews.com/software/third_party/doom_ on_the_olpc_xo.html

OK, this is silly. The point is that the cost of implementation for these laptops is a lot more than $100. Fine. The fine article concludes:

"Of course, a more expensive computer system would just drive all of this upwards, so at least we're starting cheap. This all reminds me of Namibia's SchoolNet rejecting Microsoft's "gift" of MS Office (sans operating system!). For the OLPC project to succeed, it needs to accept that it's selling a $100 laptop with an $872 support plan, and find countries that can afford it as such."

The real travesty of the project is the resistance to pilot projects. Great, this is a fantastic laptop - incredibly well thought out design, incredible hardware price. Selling a few million laptops to a country's education ministry will be an outright failure, ending up with the government even deeper in debt. Rolling them out a bit more slowly, allowing for organic processes of diffusion to work, and best practices in-country to emerge, is a much better deal.

Spend about 30 seconds reading the source of this "news" ( http://www.olpcnews.com/ ) and you'll see this "Wayan" guy takes every opportunity to berate the project.

Although these issues must be addressed thoughtfully, this suggestion is similar to previous generations' objections to literacy, suffrage, and property rights for "the masses."

1. Oh no! What will happen if we let the masses have (x)?
2. How can they know how to manage (x) responsibly? ( by responsibly, they mean: like we prefer them to )
3. So let's not give it to them!

Honestly. It's silly to discourage the development of hardware on the basis that training isn't in place. Of course not. There's no hardware! The lack of expertise and training is a reason for developing the technology, not against it.

Without training, the OLPC experiment will fall flat with a lack of support staff and educational curricula integration. (from the olpc article)

If you put the equipment into the hands of the people, the street will find uses for things. Black and brown people are not stupid. Like all things in life, it's a choice involving certain levels of personal risk. If people will buy one of these laptops, they're going to want training, especially if they stretched themselves financially to obtain it. They're going to be willing to trade (social and material) goods and services for that training. With increased demand for expertise, people with initiative and talent will learn the needed information and skills. This allows a local tech economy to develop. Cost analysis can't explain this situation, which involves more than payouts into something with no return.

If you feel obligated to give everyone formal classes, not only are you insulting their intelligence and controlling what they can or ought to know, but you're pre-emptively aborting certain opportunities for local economic development.

Honestly -- I learned more about computers with Slackware on a 486 (and nothing but the howtos) than most people get in a lot of computer classes. Not everyone can do this (and I'm not suggesting we just throw people in the deep end), but that's the great thing about geeks. They can cut across the traditional socio-economic boundaries because their skills make them useful; it's definitely been the case for me.

If you look at the OLPC article suggesting $970 as the TCO for one of these machines, you see how silly this really is. Ignore, for the moment, their apparent confusion over whose expenses they're describing. Look instead at their actual figures. Where did they get the $108 for initial setup? Can't you just ghost all the machines automatically? Also, how do they get away with putting a dollar value to the effect of potential future political instability on the cost of internet services?

Note: In some developing settings, the introduction of mobile phones has been bittersweet, since not everyone makes wise choices (for people in the West, wealth is a blinding, useful buffer for waste and bad choices. The poor have a different margin of error). People will sometimes go into debt to obtain a mobile (they become a status symbol, or people misunderstand their role/value, or because people have a strong desire to stay connected).

Laptops are bound to create similar issues, but laptops are fundamentally different from mobile phones in their positive, versatile potential. And the introduction of new technology always introduces complex, bittersweet social change.

But mobile phones have been a positive development. According to an article in The Economist, "the London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves."

Muhammad Yunus, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners, has said that "When you

So here it is:

PER LAPTOP INVOICE, 5 YEARS

• Setup
• • Initial Hardware $148.00
  • Setup (1-time fee) $108.00
  • Total Setup $256.00
• Training
• • Yearly $27.60
  • Total Training $138.00
• Maintenance
• • Yearly $7.40
  • Total Maintenance $37.00
• Internet
• • First Year $1 $1.00
  • Yearly $135.00
  • Total Internet $541.00
• 5 Year Total $972.00

Don't criticize this! It would be like criticising THE Church! And that could get you lightning bolts up your arse!

What ignoramus marked this as Troll?

You are obviously not aware that Nicholas Negroponte himself, of OLPC, claimed that, "I don't respond to such criticism. Because criticising this project is like criticising the church, or the Red Cross.".

http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/negropon te_to_critic.html
http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/features/ technology/tec314092006.html

If you are ignorant, don't moderate.

The machine is using a 7 layer lead free motherboard that can be fabbed in about 20 places on the planet. It's a guaranteed hook to increase the public debt of third world countries by tying them to sucking off the G8 hind tit forever. It is a showcase of technology, not practicality. If you want something practical go one or two generations back and make something that can be fabbed indigenously, or as close to it as possible.

Why $100? it's a nice round number that sounds cheap to US supporters. In reality it isn't: If Argentina, a relatively prosperous place, can't even afford it. IMO, they're better off having more teachers in classrooms and more BOOKS! (never mind clean water, food, and a relatively peaceful environment). People who think that childern can't learn without a computer have their heads in the clouds. Children can't learn without reference materiels and teachers, and certainly can't learn if they are sick, hungry, or being shot at. If you're going to ask a third world country to make the sort of investment this entails they would be better off solving real problems than ones invented by people with their heads int the clouds on /., or by some CEO wanting to showcase fancy technology and create a market for it.

The machine is using a 7 layer lead free motherboard that can be fabbed in about 20 places on the planet. It's a guaranteed hook to increase the public debt of third world countries by tying them to sucking off the G8 hind tit forever. It is a showcase of technology, not practicality. If you want something practical go one or two generations back and make something that can be fabbed indigenously, or as close to it as possible.

Why $100? it's a nice round number that sounds cheap to US supporters. In reality it isn't: If Argentina, a relatively prosperous place, can't even afford it. IMO, they're better off having more teachers in classrooms and more BOOKS! (never mind clean water, food, and a relatively peaceful environment). People who think that childern can't learn without a computer have their heads in the clouds. Children can't learn without reference materiels and teachers, and certainly can't learn if they are sick, hungry, or being shot at. If you're going to ask a third world country to make the sort of investment this entails they would be better off solving real problems than ones invented by people with their heads int the clouds on /., or by some CEO wanting to showcase fancy technology and create a market for it.

Those political views created open source, without which the OLPC project could not achieve its goals.

check this out

Intel's Classmate PC is beefier than the OLPC - faster processor (900MHz), 1GB of flash (double the current iteration of half a gig), twice the RAM, XP embedded SP2, and costs about $100 more due to the larger processor and memory.

AND you don't have to buy them a million at a time like the OLPC.

Initial prototypes have generated a great deal of interest, and Intel claims that orders have been received from Mexico, Nigeria, India, and Brazil. It is worth noting that India evaluated the OLPC 2B1 laptop and decided not to purchase any. Source.

I think it is supposed to be targetted at populations that don't really have a geek culture as you understand it (my own intuition about geek culture - the gamer/comic/fan version of it, rather than the budding scientist part of it - is that it occurs in the developed world where you have a lower middle class with enough disposable income, but limited cultural capital.)

My skepticism about OLPC has just been captured by someone looking at the numbers (from the Jem report article cited above.) At first, I thought OLPC was simply misguided and well-meaning - I'm starting to view it as a kind of trojan horse.