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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."
Those of you who were hailing Khaddafi's deep commitment to freedom when he jumped aboard will be relieved to know that he's not going anywhere anytime soon, though...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
they are supposed to be free, so it's probably government funded. Still, the conecpet is right, how many people will be taking these from the children?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
libya has oil and is not a real poor country.
"These oil revenues and a small population give Libya one of the highest GDPs per person in Africa"
At least one terrorist video will reveal a OLPC in the background.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Again, Linux uses its monopoly position in the free-OS market to stomp on Corporate America. Companies such as Microsoft cannot compete with the hippy OS because they have employees to pay, hardware to buy, and general overhead that any company has and cannot compete with Linux which is put together in a COMMUNIST style by a bunch of long-haired (Alex, RMS) free-thinkers.
This monopoly position must be dealt with to level the playing field so that American companies (not the Finnish) can pass more of their profits on to people like you and I who hold shares in their retirement portfolios.
TDz.
I think someone decided free laptop was easier than basic schooling.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
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.
The battery can be charged with a hand crank.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
---
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.
Believe it or not the OLPC people are not COMPLETE FUCKING MORONS
There are lockdown measures to avoid corrupt distribution. A black market wouldn't really work because a stolen OLPC laptop won't work. Not to mention that they're pretty much useless for most other tasks. A geek may want one for the neat factor or for an effective terminal. But you can't exactly play 3d shooters on them, or store gigabytes of movies or whatever (I doubt you could even play a divx on it).
The corrupt market would be to steal the boards and then try to sell them to schools. Which is exactly what they're aiming to stop.
As for the GP, yes, it's COUNTRIES that buy them, not students.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Found this in the OLPCWiki:
Will OLPC spin-off a commercial subsidiary?
The idea is that a commercial subsidiary could manufacture and sell a variation of the OLPC in the developed world. These units would be marked up so that there would be a significant profit which can be plowed into providing more units in countries who cannot afford the full cost of one million machines.
The discussions around this have talked about a retail price of 3× the cost price of the units.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Our_market
Nice to know I'd be thinking of the children rather that stealing their laptops...
DN
Or have it stolen by an adolescent or adult who will trade it for food, toys, weapons, drugs, sex, or money. Medicine my ass.
Let's be realistic. People are not nice.
Question everything
So you have been to a lot of third world countries? Oh, you haven't? Every time this project is mentioned experts of your caliber start spewing their 0.02$ around. Interestingly, that's approximately how much those expert views are worth. Combined.
:| .. I dunno... But at least I'm also doing something instead of just complaining. I've left one laptop in Gambia and one in Chile before. I'll be on a round the world trip in about a month and a half (hopefully) and I'm packing lots of older laptops to give away. Guess what kind of OS they'll be running. That's my OLPC(ountry ;P).
I've been to a few third world countries. One of them is Thailand (they are among the ones interested in the OLPC). I bet you'll see more poverty and illiteracy in New York than i Bangkok. Can you please get it through your brick wall that _any_ countrys population is not homogenous? Some people may have no use of a OLPC laptop while others will. Just as in the west. Another country i've visited where I stayed with the locals is Gambia. It's a pretty poor country but most of the young ones I met spoke 3-5 languages.Virtually everyone spoke English and French, then their tribal language and one or more of the other bigger tribal languages. How many languages do you speak? How many can you write?
Poverty != stupidity. Poor country != everyone being hungry and illiterate. People in poor countries are often much more motivated to study because they know it's a way out of poverty.
Hmmm... Why do I bother feeding trolls....
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
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.
I think corruption is a bigger problem. Without good governance, change is hard. How soon until one laptop per child becomes one warlord with all the laptops? He'll have to let some children use them (such is the nature of feudalism), but I can't see it being otherwise. Laptops aren't the same as education, anyway. It sounds like silicon snake-oil to me.
I should also say that the corruption is hardly just some internal matter for various African states. These leaders are aided and abbedded by rich nations across the world. Foreign meddling in the affairs of Africa has been intense and ongoing, but no one wants to talk about how they secure their oil rights, fishing rights, the use of their GM crops over local varieties, and so on. It's unpleasant.
Africa needs clean government to have a chance as much as it needs clean water. I can't see the laptop as part of the solution. You could argue that laptops make education easier, and that education drives economic growth. However, the prime examples of that (Japan, Korea, Singapore) all had stable governments and some measure of physical safety for citizens. In the absence of these things, what will stop the newly educated adults from leaving for the US, the EU, India, or China?
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Just to clarify (I'm a developer working for the OLPC) that we've had developer boards for months-and-months now, using them to test the software on. These particular computers are simply more complete. But yeah, speed has been a major factor all along.
-- Kleptotherapy: Helping those who help themselves.
Quanta is a Taiwan company.
Or, if Microsoft had their way, teach a man to fish and you can sell him expensive, proprietary bait for life .....
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The point is to remove the worth.
It's a 300MHz x86 board with a gray-scale display (the colour is faked), 128M of ram, 512M of flash, no cdrom, no advanced GPU, very small keys, and the host OS is designed for small children. Perfect for reading, playing simple learning games, and browsing the web. Sucks for games, videos, music and the like.
I seriously doubt there will be a huge black market for adults to hack them and turn them into a standard Linux PC. Selling them as is to children won't be really productive either. I'm not saying people won't try. I just doubt it will be very successful.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yes, and not only that, but that Taiwan is NOT China is really important to its 23 million citizens. Taiwan is a democracy that has its own armies, controls its own borders, directly elects its own president, legislature... Sure, there are some reasons, unrelated to the fact that China constantly blares that it owns Taiwan and will p8wn Taiwan if Taiwan or anyone else says otherwise, but they are not good ones, and if there was ever a good guy--bad guy David vs. Goliath if you ever saw one situation, Taiwan is it. So please. Taiwan is NOT China. Quanta is a Taiwanese company that may happen to do a lot of business in China. Still, it is not the same thing and it's an important distinction to make.
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.
It's not a traditional LCD. The colour elements, as I was explained by an OLPC staffer (hint: I'm writing their BIOS security code...), are not stacked, and that you didn't have three elements per pixel. The filtering is REQUIRED to make it look aesthetically pleasing.
I imagine if we had close ups of the REAL screen and not the simulator you'd see what I'm talking about.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.