Slashdot Mirror
$100 PC Pledges Fail To Meet Minimum
bobthemuse writes, "Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop PC was demonstrated back in May, and a PledgeBank was set up: the goal was to get 100,000 people to purchase an OLPC for $300, allowing the project to send two of the devices to the proposed users. Today the pledge ended and only 3,678 people had signed up." It looks like a mention in Slashback a few weeks ago gave a boost to the effort, but not a big enough one.
I saw this when it was announced and tbh was put off by this:
"I will purchase the $100 laptop at $300 but only if 100,000 other will too."
I would gladly sign up for a $100 laptop if it cost $100.
I realise everything about starting up and getting the ball rolling but I cannot waste an additional $200.
Its that simple.
liqbase
I wonder if there is a special reason that requires 100,000 participants (that is, 200,000 OLPC, 300,000 altogether).
Does that mean they can't produce and sell these laptop if there were only 5,000 orders?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
You'd say PledgeBank would run into a problem in handling all the applications by all them righteous slashdotters. You know, the geeks that get bullied, kicked and bashed because they read books, are proficient with computers, value educated discussion and surely would want to give poorer people a shot at being educated.
... But they didn't ...
There must a whole bunch of cheapskates here on slashdot.
FYI, I pledged for three. Then, for a short time, I contemplated to let them keep the third PC as well. But that is betrayal because you shouldn't dump second grade stuff onto the 3rd world. I decided to actually use the third one seriously and to contribute at least with bug reports.
Hell, I even convinced my not-so-techie brother to pledge and he did. And also consider that we're not from the USA. We're from a part of the world where USD 300 is a higher percentage of our nett income.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Rather, an unrealistic expectation. It's difficult to sell 100,000 of anything, let alone through a grassroots campaign like this.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Pledging really isn't something that most people like doing. Outside of the wider public this project has been remarkably quiet. I don't even remember seeing the Pledgebank.
Sign up to buy a computer and then a few months later find out later whether you'll be able to buy one. It's really inconvenient. Such a project requires wider grassroots adoption and the support of a lot of people. The amount of money pledged was huge.
100,000 computers at $300 a pop is $30m. Making the effort part of telethon's and charity drives might have been much more effective than just having a website where you can't even buy one.
It's a cheap simple computer. It might have found a good audience in non geeks interested in trading up from old Windows 98 boxes. It's the one laptop per child project. For selling it in the 1st world it was marketed wrong. It might have done very well if sold as something to get your kid for Christmas instead of an Xbox 360 or an iPod where most of the money goes to charity. Meanwhile the iPod nano Red will sell in huge numbers with a lower (but very decent) amount going to charity.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
I think one reason why there's not much enthusiasm about this program is a difference of philosophies in how to educate the world's children. Generally speaking, people would rather spend $100 to buy books for a bunch of underprivileged children rather than spend it to buy one computer for one child. The applications of computers in grade school education in the US are kind of fuzzy, which makes it difficult to see how useful they would be in a less industrialized society.
Besides all that, there are numerous other costs associated with making these laptops useful. For example, there's maintenance, theft replacement, training for teachers, and development of a standard computer-based curriculum. Many of these costs are recurring, which means that in the long run, these kids could be worse off from having so much money being tossed onto the bonfire trying to maintain a computer-based education program.
This is NOT a failiure of the project itself. It's a failet net-pledge only. The goal of which was pretty unrealistic anyway. I still signed up though... :) ... one can always hope I thought. Anyway:
This is NOT a failiure of the "One Laptop Per Child" project.
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Sell it to slashdot users for $120 (mfg makes a small profit). That way some of the buyers will end up using it to develop OSS educational SW for it. They should also color code the units; say green for students, blue for teachers, and red for developers (the $120 units). That way if you see a green unit for sale on E-bay - you (and E-bay) knows it's stolen property.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Ahhh, wait a minute, before everyone starts harping on this, notice:
This pledgebank wasn't started by the project and isn't connected to them at all. This is nothing more than a well-intentioned and failed internet petition.
Really, nothing to see here.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Yes, at $100 each. This was a charity drive to get them to people whose governments *weren't* buying them.
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
I'm part of the team that runs PledgeBank. You might be interested in this experimental Pledge I just put up for people who still want to be involved with OLPC, but on a more realistic and local level. http://www.pledgebank.com/olpchackers The Pledge is unique because it uses a new feature that isn't in general circulation on PledgeBank yet, cascading Pledges. These are global pledges which you sign up to locally, making a mini version of each pledge with a group of other people who live near you. Take a look, even if you don't sign up, and please give us feedback. This is very much an alpha feature, although the pledge is real.
We in rich countries don't give laptops to every one of our kids, yet we seem to think we can tell poor countries that this is what they need. I think of a dozen things that would benefit the poor way before we start thinking about fucking PCs.
In case you havent been out in the boonies, if you take the chicken bus from any big city in 95% of the countries of the world, out an hour or so, you get to villages where there are no schools, no paper, no pencils, no books, no nuttin!
Those people need:
They do not need: money wasted on what random first-worlders thing third worlders need.
Nor do I believe that dumping things that we wouldn't use on the 3rd world is going to make the [technology] gap disappear -- au contraire. I'd rather see them receive one $1000 laptop than ten $100 ones that aren't similar to what the rest of the world use. "Better than what they have" isn't a valid argument, as it serves to keep the gap.
Developing countries cannot maintain a "fleet" of up-to-date computers, as every PC is rendered obsolete by "progress" within 3 years. "what the rest of the world uses" is a con -- p*ss-poor programming and planned obsolescence mean we spend ridiculous amounts of money to continue to be able to do the same thing year-on-year.
I work in an IT support department -- my PC is used for email, word-processing and browsing, and as a Citrix client for connecting to our SMS servers. All this could be done adequately on a Win95-era Pentium. However, my current 2.8 GHz, 248MB WinXP PC continues to grind along far too slowly.
One of the key benefits of the OLPC project is that unlike the schemes that redeploy old corporate kit, it defines a closed platform. It can run word processors; it can do email; it can run a Xterm/Citrix/TS/etc client, and it will never become obsolete as it has an established user base. It would become a reference minimum-spec platform for a great deal of Linux development.
Knock-on effects? Maybe the developed world would break out of the continual upgrade cycle. With a fixed minimum-spec machine for office tasks, maybe network computing would finally take off, with every office deploying application servers for the (rare) processor intensive apps. Perhaps we'd see more efficient, non-bloat software. Perhaps the developed countries would say "That's neat -- I bet I could fit that in a palmtop" and finally bridge the gap between desktop and handheld computing.
HAL
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'