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One Laptop Per Child Gets 4 Million Laptop Order
An anonymous reader writes "DesktopLinux.com is reporting that four countries have together ordered 4 million low-cost, Linux-based laptops from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The countries of Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand have each placed the 1 million unit orders."
I have a lot of respect for this project and I'm glad to see it's working out seemingly well.
Random Thought:
Wonder if any of the large PC vendors are paying attention, When was the last time Dell or HP sold 1 million+ Windows boxes in one shot?
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Cha-Ching!!!
Is that the sound of a non-profit organization selling laptops at cost? These people will probably make passable salaries courtesy of the organization, but these are not going to be multi-million dollar CEOs and CTOs. Their only major gain here is possibly the minor fame that comes with starting a project like this. In fact, I think most of the companies involved are selling the parts are near cost. The fact is that everybody wants to get a choke-hold on emerging markets (the same markets that these target); but even if that happens for AMD and the like, I don't think Negroponte or any other "owner" is going to be exploiting starving children or their poor governments in order to buy shiny red Ferraris.
Now this would be a nice toy for my own daughters (says father, who wouldn't mind taking this thing apart). Too bad they don't take orders below one million pieces.
Considering the low specs of this thing how about releasing the distribution and libraries that will run on this? It should be trivial to build a VM that allows you to play with developing software to run in this kind of environment.
To ensure that this project doesn't flop right from the start -- I presume that they would like people to develop some software for it.... (visions of US$ 100 doorstops all over Asia)
Last time cheap laptops went on sale/given away there were so many rioting and fighting people that several were hospitalized. I wonder how a 3rd world country would deal with giving away these laptops, and how long they'll stay in the hands they are given to.
They come standard with wireless mesh and connection sharing, IIRC. The idea being that the school can get at least one of them connected, then they all are. Things they all need still only need to be downloaded once, then shared peer to peer over the much faster wireless connection, so it should be quite useful.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Nigeria can't feed its own people and now they are wasting $100M on something so that white men in the west can feel good about spreading "information" or something. Bah.
It could help the parent of said child know that the child has measles and get them to the hospital.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
actually I believe the idea was to get the kids to actually teach themselves and learn about the real operating of a computer. I'm sure the linux stuff will be there (as well as the GUI). I imagine that they will have the option to go wherever they want with it.
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Like others said, these countries aren't third world and starved, but quite prosperous. The project is not aimed at helping only starving impoverished countries, but also helping countries that need to take the next technological step.
They have food and water (ever been to thailand? Food's the last thing they need help with), but they don't have access to technology.
A day's eating in Thailand can cost around $1. A good salary is anything over $200/month. Not much to you and me, but it's plenty for all of life's (biological) essentials there, including health care.
But $200/month limits people's access to technology. Sure, you can get broadband access and they seem to have more mobile phone shops than the rest of the world combined, Bangkok even has one of the world's largest computer shoping centres...but outside the cities, technology and salaries are more limited.
Therefore the OLPC project will help bridge this gap.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
This guy would disagree!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I am glad that this opens up opportunities for many children to learn about computers and grow up using them. All my life, I've had a computer around, and since everything is run by computers these days, it will do a couple things for those nations. Education of such a powerful tool will help them to get better jobs, and hopefully it will increase the market power for the countries.
I for one welcome these laptop weilding children of the world!
Just because it has an x86-type processor doesn't mean that it will have the old IBM PC addressing schema ..... in fact, there are good reasons not to. Separate I/O and memory buses went out with the PDP-11. Lump all I/O and the framebuffer into regular address space, then have the real memory addressed in contiguous pages. Display generation and DRAM refresh can then be done by the CPU itself with only a slight speed penalty (think '80s 8-bit machines, but with enough RAM for a fully bit-mapped screen). In the worst case, you end up carving your addressing space in half; but even just 2**47 words of addressable memory and a 2**46 word framebuffer ought to be enough!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
That is exactly my concern. These people will have a choice between gaining literacy and skills, and maybe starting businesses to further their local economy, or gain literacy and skills to spam and scam once they learn that the rewards outweigh the risks for them.
And we thought there were a lot of spam, AdSense blogs and phishing now. Wait until x% of four million new computer users catch wind of a way to get their hands on more USD than is open to them via legal means.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Come to think of it, the moment they have access to ebay you might be able to buy one from them ;) Still, just know that you won't gain much feedback on that transaction, as they won't have anything to send their feedback from anymore... Actually, this is probably something that might happen, especially if they need the $300 they can get for it pretty bad.
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I can't believe how many of you downplay the significance of this. Many say "simply giving these people computers will not educate them". I disagree. I think placing these machines in the hands of those who could benefit from them will have an enormous impact, even if they just magically appeared on 4 million computerless peoples' doorsteps.
Here's the anecdotal support for my opinion here... I am an example of someone who learned to master computers at a young age, and who now makes a good living programming them. My dad had an interest in computers so he set aside enough money to get some for our family, but he really didn't have the time, motivation, and ability to figure out how to do much with them. Didn't matter, me just being a curious and geeky kid, merely having access to a computer was all it took to get me started down my path to success. My dad didn't teach me, I taught myself dialing BBSes with our 2400 baud modem after reading in the newspaper that such activities were possible.
There ARE millions of kids in these countries who would respond to having a computer around very similarly to how I did. In many cases, if they can't use it, someone else they know will. Computer skills are so heavily linked to financial success these days, it seems quite foolish to think exposing more people to computers will not be a huge boon to any country that manages to do it.
Yes, many recepients will sell their laptops on ebay, but they will be cheap. Most of them will remain in the countries that bought them. The people who buy them will make good use of them and likely would not have been able to afford a comparable machine otherwise.
In my part of the world, Canada, I have gone from installing a few GNU/Linux machines each year to doing 150 next month. At about half the cost of Windows, per seat, if the project works out (I do not see any obstacles), other schools and school divisions in my area are likely to switch to GNU/Linux. I will present a report at a school conference next spring, and if there is lots of interest, I could convert several schools next summer.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Actually, the major gain will be that there will be four million installs of Squeak in the wild suddenly. Not only that, but there will be four million people learning Smalltalk as their first programming language. Considering that the entire Squeak environment was written by ten people, if even half a percent of them go on to contribute to the project this could have a huge impact. At the very least, we are likely to, once again, have a generation of programmers who realise quite how primitive developer tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio really are.
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The enviornment is Python not Squeak.
This is a pretty interesting idea, I think.
If you're going to turn out a few million identical machines to people who don't have a whole lot of backwards-compatibility requirements, you can suddenly do a lot of things that mainstream PC manufacturers can't. I'd really like to see them blank-slate design the architecture, within the requirements of cost (i.e. using off-the-shelf parts).
I guess the only problem is that you don't want to stray too far from 'conventional' PCs, because you want the experience that kids get working on these machines to be easily translatable to what the rest of the world uses; however, maybe using a slightly different architecture will teach a valuable lesson about the benefits of writing agnostic code for standard toolsets.
I'll be perfectly honest here: I'm rather cynical about the OLPC project ever actually accomplishing its goals. But despite that, I think it's a noble effort and I wish them well, if just because it's a hell of a technical question, and the engineer in me thinks that any project that really puts a lot of minds to work on a problem like that is pretty neat. Even if the majority of the laptops end up getting sold to us First Worlders on eBay, the fact that they will have designed such a machine and produced it -- provided they can do it, naturally -- will keep me from calling it a total failure. Regardless of the outcome, OLPC is going to be a case study for anyone thinking big in technology.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How is this different from any new people anywhere in the world? Or is it just all those shifty, foreign people in developing nations you suspect as criminals in the making?
Interesting fact: the US (the world's richest nation) accounts for the majority of all spam, at 23.2%. "These people" have more to fear from the the outside world than you do from them.
But of course you're right. Let's keep the internet safe for the gullible rich, and out of the hands of wily poor people who, as we all know, have no morals and want to take our money. Keep 'em backward and ignorant I say.
But you can develop software for it! That's the whole point! You don't need one of the actual machines: you can replicate the development environment on any old PC.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
No, I agree, I was joking a little bit, but I think when people get he basic essentials that it removes unwanted losers. CRAZZZZZZZZZINESS.
I don't really even think Americans get the basic essentials since our cities are so without and I think we have worse wireless then China and Bangladesh. So ridiculous as homes in the suburbs average about half a million. A total joke but I'm tired of laughing. They should have free homes up front as a foundation. GNU/Home.
People could trade homes this way. If they are in the program they get first dibs on a new home anywhere. Open source homes.
Assuming this is the same project mentioned in last month's Wired magazine, the laptops can be recharged using (among other things) physical labor (i.e. pulling a string, similar to how you start a lawnmower).
Really, sending something more practical like the parts to build a power plant, or tractors to grow food...might just be a better idea than a laptop
Seems like the World Bank has been trying things like that since the 1960's, and in many cases they didn't improve the situation much for anyone other than the government in power and their cronies. So why not try something new? Perhaps the problem has been that the things that would seem practical to a naive westerner aren't so practical after all.
We'll see what happens -- either these laptops will make a difference, or they won't. But don't be so quick to cast judgement on a program you don't know very much about. It's not like MIT is just jumping into this on a whim... they've given it several years of thought, and consulted with many people familiar with the areas they are trying to help.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I live in the capital city, Buenos Aires, and you can find:
-A district called "Puerto Madero", a very modern, full of turist, zone. It has a lot of casinos, hotels and restaurants. Apart from that, it's full of private yachts. -Not very far it's located my district, "Flores", in which people are mostly middle class. -Closer than my district to Puerto Madero, there's the "Villa 31", a very poor zone.
Well, I'm sick of people that keeps stereotyping the different nationalities too, but I'm playing the same 'game' than everybody does here. It seems that if you don't play it you're out.
Hi.
Perhaps then, you should look at how to protect the less fortunate in either system.
In a libertarian system, you can't.
In a socialist system, you can.
I think we have a winner.