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First of the OLPCs Built
eldavojohn writes "An announcement came Sunday that the first ten prototypes of the Linux-powered OLPC XO-1 had been completed in China. From the article, 'Quanta, the Chinese computer maker that won the international bidding for the project earlier this year, will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners.' Let's hope that these first prototypes do not warrant any design changes and that the testing goes well so that countries that expressed interest (Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Argentina, and Thailand) can start distributing them soon."
I think someone decided free laptop was easier than basic schooling.
The exit from poverty is education. Give a man a fish and he'll have food for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll ruin your fishing economy.
Or something like that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First: It's not people buying them, it's governments.
Second: Not everyone outside of the US and Europe is starving in a mud hut. Both Libya and Brazil are modern, technical societies with substantial wealth. Both countries would certainly benefit from increased technical skills among their local populations.
Remeber that the OLPC is designed to replace textbooks in schools, and over the life of the machine will almost certainly provide a cost savings over printed books.
In addition, the project will foster local IT development as more and more people learn to use, repair, modify, and program for the machines. This will lead to free and/or locally produced software and a local IT service sector, keeping money in local economies rather than sending it to Redmond or to other Western software houses and consultancies.
From a development perspective, this is a cheap project with enormous potential -- it could eventually bring an even bigger fundamental change in developing societies than micro credit progams have.
1) give computer to child
2) come back in a week
If computer survives AND the kid didn't get bored with it, the test passes.
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It's lame but laugh anyways.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So why not have the US Government buy laptops for underprivileged kids? They are in need of computers just as much as people in other countries, if not more, to stay on par with their peers.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Being in several grades school around the country (and not in rich areas), I realized that there are plenty of "third world" type of realities in middle America. Underfunded schools, unmotivated students in depressed areas, many of them with huge literacy problems (reading deficiencies). From experience I can tell that what those kids need is motivation, something that they can get excited. So, why not deploying the OLPC in these communities/schools? It seems that people here are talking of the US as a very homogeneous country. They are not. Very poor areas exist, and kids there are no different (unfortunately) with their pairs in Brazil.