Slashdot Mirror
The Failure of the $100 Laptop?
RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."
The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful.
Computer engineers and software developers are just that - they can create software and build computers.
They aren't molecular biologists or doctors or anything like that, so its not taking the mindshare from those kind of folks.
liqbase
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals
Considering that this $100 laptop does not come bundled with a Microsoft OS, we can really expect impartial reporting from MSN.
a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut.
I wonder if this writer has ever been to the third world. This is simply disgusting. Yes sure, everyone in Africa still lives in huts, and Eskimos live in igloos, etc. Careful, you may be eaten by cannibals while you're out there, too! While there still are some few extremely poor indiginous communities who lack even electricity, I doubt they would have any use for a laptop - even as a source of light.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Did they miss that running Vista was not one of the goals?
:(){
Giving them a laptop might make them productive.
Giving them food will make them dependent.
However, the added value of a laptop is greatly degraded by the lack of electricity in most places and the lack of education. The laptop program should also focus on these things to be succesful.
Look at the list of countries that have expressed an interest so far:
* Brazil
* Thailand
* Egypt
* United States (specifically the states of Massachusetts and Maine)
* Cambodia
* Dominican Republic
* Costa Rica
* Tunisia
* Argentina
* Venezuela
* Nigeria
* Libya
Firstly, the minority are african, secondly most of them have basic housing and a working power infrastructure. This laptop idea is something that countries come in on when they want to improve education. It is not, and never has been, an alternative to buying food.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Like the countries that has expessed interest in the $100 lappy are not the wretchedly poor but rather those that have basic necessities covered but are not yet industrialized. For them a cheap computer will come in very handy. For people being murdered in Darfur, not so much.
Not everyone can become a success by marketshare and hype alone, and then never deliver the actual promised products. For most of us, failure is just another step towards success. So even if this $100 laptop becomes a failure, it doesn't matter. More exposure towards the poorer countries, more exposure that the Western countries take more money OUT of such countries, than is going in, more exposure to corrupt leaders which makes any sudden fix unattainable, and lots and lots learned from the project, which can result in even cheaper laptops with higher specs.
It's too easy to criticize when someone does good. That to actually do good in this world, you have to fight, and fight, and fight, and fight. And we get stronger every day.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
That this laptop project is of benefit .. cause $100 would never have been spent on feeding the village. So this way at least their can use the plastic for something(fuel for stove?) if not educate themselves on farming and basic first aid techniques.
.. it's for POOR KIDS WHO ALREADY HAVE THE BASICS TAKEN CARE OF. This would give them a step up so they can have assistance in learning shit and build some industry besides inefficient farming.
Also how many times are imbeciles (John C.(for Cunt?) Dvorak I am opinionating on you), going to need to be told that THE LAPTOP IS FOR MIDDLE DEVELOPING NATIONS NOT LEAST DEVELOPED NATIONS YOU FOOL!
This laptop aint for starving kids
Over a laptop, clean water might be a priority.
1. First step - denial - "Bullshit, you won't produce 100$ laptop, is a vaporware, etc. etc. Better use those nice PocketPC with newest Windows CE!"
2. Second step (when real hardware is produced) - it won't work - "Yeah, nice hardware you have here...but know what, it won't help, it won't work for reasons it have been created. We know, we foreseen the future! They will sell it...emmm....(who would need such a crap anyway)...they won't find any use of it, they will trade it for food..."
3. Third step will be - never mind, you are there, let's copy you - "Huh, yeah, OLPC was a nice success, but see, we are better, because we worked on this device (half-baked copied attempt is shown), and it works much better. And there is Solitaire! Minesweeper! Word! All goddies! Buy us, please (sight)"
Microsoft way they see the world doesn't change. The same arrogance. The same "me, me, me" and we are much clever than others, therefore everyone should be steeling their IP...etc.
Microsoft, go fuck yourself. Let's see final results of trial in several countries and then let's judge this device. Probably all won't go smooth, but...
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Black and white thinking perceives the economic divide to be so immense that there is no middle ground of lack that can be alleviated. Unable to come up with a grand unified solution to the world poverty problem, they give up and distract themselves with a shiny new mp3 player.
Of course there are many, many people who still don't have access to clean water. Let's put our minds together to work on that problem as well. There's room for our service on all levels of impoverishment.
This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.
Are these $100 Laptops powerful enough to play WoW?
Are these $100 Laptops such a time waster that even more people die because, now, they forget to eat?
I call this entire "news" bullshit and made up to pee onto this project. Some might have an interest in seeing this $100 Laptop project fail and bribes the corrupt media outlets.
2. Slashdot sucks this FUD in.
3. $100 Laptop project failed in the media.
4. $100 Laptop project gets cancelled because it failed in the glorious media.
5. Assholes successfully turned time back again.
You know why this $100 Laptop project will fail? Because the Laptops have a handle and do not need expensive power cells that might blow up. What would you do if you own a company that produces such power cells and sees $100 Laptops with a crank?
You would foulmouth the whole thing in the media. And if the face on the TV screen looks important enough even smart people will laugh about the $100 Laptop project.
"It is dead.", "It is sooo 2005."... and stuff like that will get pulled out of attention whores ass and the people who benefit from these computers were never asked if they were a success.
Maybe you should have given them $100 TV's so they can watch how the media rules even their lives.
Would be to build small, one room tech centers and use 5-10-20 machines per location. I think this would give local users incentive to either save the money necessary to use the machines or work on a community level to maintain and keep the centers functioning if the services are intended to be free. Libraries in this country are centers for learning, I think situations like this should be treated one in the same: a service is provided to the local community, and through continual effort, those services can be enjoyed by all who choose to participate and help cultivate this in to some thing long lasting and ultimately, educational - the original purpose intended (we hope).
If there are still pending issues with power distribution to these areas, then yes, remove such an emphasis on placing, in the name of building industry 'face', all the eggs in one basket and shelling out unusable laptops to countries that can't even afford to power their homes with electricity.
One would think that as a totally 'use, abuse, and buy-new-when-it-comes-out, and throw the old one away' kind of country like the US, that we'd be moving a larger initiative to recycle our old machines, refurb them, and ship them off to needy locations who can use the technology that every one here thinks is outdated.
OFCOURSE the problem with any project that uses things like computers/radios/video ect... is that its hard to make these programs sustainable. Typical projects have funding for 3-5 years in which time they distribute thousands of the things and then bam! one day the money runs out, the project ends, ... and then what? That is a problem with ALL development projects. The trick is to build sustainability.
Young people in a poor village in Africa are no different than anywhere else, and if you give them access to a networked computer with access to internet the possibilities are endless.
There are many successful projects implementing cell phones to help farmers get better prices for their crops. There are radio shows that teach people about HIV with call in shows using text messaging. The possibilities are endless. The next step is to integrate computers and internet into the matrix.
The truth is, you could probably buy a lot of flour for a single village for $100 for a year-- but once they have eaten it, they will still be hungry. Give a village a cheap device such as the $100 laptop and access to a network, the possibilities to exchange knowledge, generate ideas, and problem solve for THEMSELVES is limitless. This is how you create sustainability. Give them the tools and ideas, the rest can follow.
fed for a day, teach to fish ...
The goal is not to give kids toys. It's to give them the means to explore education.
Obviously "feeding a village" isn't solving the problem, it's just keeping uneducated poor masses alive.
I'd rather educate them so they can help themselves.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year"
:) )
Ok I am from India so $100 = 4500 Rs, now I would be really delighted to learn how one can feed a village for a year with that much of money. No,I really would like to know...considering the fact that villages in developing countries are genrally big( I can speak for India here, I spend half of my childhood in the most backward region of India,
I really appreciate intelligence of Mr.John C. Dvorak, but wait...
An article about the OLPC on 'Microsoft Network Money Central'. Give me a break.
I am brazilian. As such, I've seen that most foreign people simply don't understand the socio-economics of developing countries.
An anedoctal evidence: I have some relatives in Italy, and I visited there once or twice. They live in the most developed and well-fared north, somewhere near Brescia, not too far from Milano. Brescia itself has some 200k habitants, and the city they lived in should have some 20-30k. One night, after showing me around, they asked me (quite seriously) if I was distressed from the "big cities", seeing so many people and cars and so on. I looked back at them nonplused, I suppose. I grew up in Sao Paulo, go look in wikipedia how big is that. But I understand that people from Europe and US mostly believe that all Brazilians live either in huts around the Amazon forest or in very poor "favelas" around Rio de Janeiro, where they can conveniently get dressed up (or down?) for Carnaval. Well, I am not trying to say there is a large percentage of the population in Brazil and other developing countries that is indeed very poor and has not access to technology (a recent survey says around 40% of brazilians never used a computer, and 60% never entered "the Internets"). But most people here have some kind of access to school, however poor and lacking resources they might be, and they are not naive helpless savages as you might guess. People need opportunities to grow. Sending US$100 worth of food to poor people might do some well to those that indeed do not have enough to eat, and I'd urge responsible people to donate (or even better, get engaged in) reliable organizations that do that task. But giving away food won't put the poor people around here, India or Africa in the right way, where they can build a self-sustainable industry and technology to compete with today developed countries. So, either some people are simply ignorant or naive enough to understand this, or perhaps they are beginning to get worried that someday the countries that supply food and raw materials to them today at bargain prices won't be there anymore.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
... from selling those laptops.
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
What lost mind share??? This laptop isn't stealing "mind share" away from other ideas. If other ideas fail it's because no one cares about them. What these people in this article are whining about are that they think that their way is the best, and anyone else not solving the problem their way is wrong. It's just plain bullshit. This isn't a zero sum game... There's a huge portion of the population that isn't even playing or caring. A new idea won't steal mind share, it will bring new players to the table that otherwise wouldn't be interested.
It's like the lame argument that people blame Ralph Nader for stealing votes from the Democrats. Again, bullshit. A good part of the people who voted for Nader didn't want to vote for Gore OR Bush, so without that alternative, they probably wouldn't have voted. It's not Nader for screwing over Gore, it's Gore's fault for not making himself a more viable candidate.
From the article: "And in today's world the real value of a computer is it being networked," says Zachary. "Finding a network in the poor areas is either impossible or very expensive." Obviously, the writer missed the point that these laptops are capable of forming wireless mesh networks in the classroom. Also, Squeak is being bundled with OLPC. See http://weeklysqueak.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/squea k-in-extremadura/ for a nice video about what is already being done with Spanish school children.
The MSN article is completely correct. Everyone knows that people are either poor, and thus live in mud huts with only a single goat to keep them company; or they are rich, in which case they can afford to buy as many computers as they can fit inside their trendy apartments.
The creators of the $100 laptop are under the delusion that wealth is not a binary condition. For some strange reason, they seem to think that there are poor people in this world that have enough money to feed themselves and buy essentials, but not enough money or infrastructure to support buying the latest Pentium from Dell. This is clearly ridiculous, and I applaud MSN Money for reminding us that the world really is black and white (no pun intended, ahem).
From the FAQ on laptop.org:
Perhaps it would have been better to interview someone who's actually put some effort into understanding what the OLPC is doing. But then again, the article itself is obviously just a rant so why bother.
up until now has been that nobody has done anything on such a large scale in relation to education. Like the people here on Slashdot, everybody got opinions, but nobody DOES ANYTHING. These people does something, they seem to be able to pull it off, so naturally, we should slam them and keep on talking.
Sure, with $100 you can feed the village for a year. The point about education though is as old as the famous adage: Give the man a fish and he can feed his family today, teach him to fish and he can feed it for a long time.
If some of you had even bothered to read the articles, see the TED:Talk speech on the subject and get some information, you'd know what's going on.
But, as usual, Slashdotters are more interested in just posting a tirade than actually knowing what they're talking about.
A flaw in his thinking is to assume that there is a fixed amount of help available. Another flaw is to assume that the laptop actually costs money. If used as an electronic book, then it substitutes for hundreds of dollars worth of books (over the course of its lifetime). Another flaw is to suggest that all expenditures are the same, blurring the difference between spending for investment and spending for consumption.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
What is the goal of the 100 USD laptop? I thought it is to provide cheap laptop for poor country, so the people are not out of date with technology. If it is so, the project itself is not a failure. It is true that the people in the developing country might need better facilities for living more than having fancy technology. IMO, the cheap laptop is part of the facilites needed, especially in the education matters.
Nigeria is also a country with reasonable cashflow - they're one of the largest oil exporters in the world. They also recently finished paying off $10 billions in loans and negotiated debt relief for another $18 billion. The $10 billions were paid off with increases in their oil revenues thanks to the rising oil price, and was paid off as a requisite for the $18 billion in relief. So thanks to the oil price they've got billions more tax revenues AND they've massively cut their interest rate payments.
They are paying for these machines themselves because they think it is useful to improve education, and they can afford a million or two with just a month or two worth of the increased revenues.
It is also a tiny investment compared to what Nigerians themselves are spending on cell phones: Currently there are more than 20 million cellphones (population of 130 million). Practically ALL of those have come in the last 4-5 years, and Nigeria has one of the highest cellphone growth rates in the world - miles ahead of the US for instance - and is rapidly catching up to the cellphone penetration in more developed countries.
The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem.
You might think a lecturer at Standford whould know better than to use the phrase these people when referring to Africans. Not everyone in Africa is without electricity and living in mud huts. Most people in Africa are not starving. Many countries on that continent are developing and at the stage where such low cost technology could actually beneficial.
The subtext is that a $100 (or $130, or $170) laptop running Linux with an AMD processor would rapidly undo the business models of some entrenched "interests" in the G7. Maybe it's fud now, or have the possibility it will "leak" into their current volume sales markets. Well, I know i'd buy one (or a couple - my wife would like one with Cath Kidston paintwork if her fingers weren't too big for the keyboard - if it was commercially available here).
I seem to recall Negraponte naming two companies who were p*ssing all over the project. If my memory serves me right, one made microprocessors and the other was in Seattle.
Ian W.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
The DaVinci code won't help those savages dig themselves out of their own poverty, but books from Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, etc just might... it just might.
Why does everyone think that every single human being in developing countries lives in mud huts and is starving to death? Reality check: being poor doesn't mean that you're starving to death or that you're living in a mud hut.
There are hundreds of millions of people in those countries that don't starve, but they're far from wealthy enough to afford a computer. A $100 computer could be a help to them, and it introduces them to computing which is a very valuable skill.
Is it so hard to understand?
Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
As a French citizen living in the third world (british midlands), I can tell you those people have no idea of what a computer is and how to use it. You'd better send cans of lager beer if you want to do something useful
MSN, a subsidiary of Microsoft, has a vested interest in seeing third-world kids using not an OLPC laptop, but the new Microsoft Xbox Live Learning Edition, with a 6-omegahurtz quad-core CPU, 64 dedicated DirectX fragment shaders, Windows Embedded and DirectX, .NET framework, and Media Center and Zune connectivity.
Don't laugh -- it could happen.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
> with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop?
because after that year they will return asking for more food, while being taught how to make their soil productive, how hunt animals without extinguish them, how to limit births to a sustainable number, how to use sun and water energy etc. would help them forever.
People should not think about the OLPC as a toy for kids to play recompiling the kernel while mum and dad are starving to death but as a container for precious information (wikipedia and tons of other sources) and a media to pass them to others.
One thing "western" people should stop thinking at all is that we can help the hungry and homeless by giving them homes and food. That's plainly wrong! Intelligence and knowledge is what gives humans the ability to make use of what they already have there to fulfill their needs. Evolution already gave them at least a basic level of intelligence, so let's teach them to read then give them books, not food.
I would think the villagers would prefer the means to bring themselves out of poverty through education over a bit of grain that will run out at the end of the year.
I think the myth that what we need to do to help extremely poor nations is to mail them food needs to be put to rest. One of the worst problems in africa (or bangladesh) is population growth. People see 20 million hungry and so they send food and pat eachother on the back. And then that 20 million swells because of the artificially increased food supply. And now we have 30 million hungry people.
I'm glad to see a little more of the "teach a man to fish" philosophy at work in developing nations, rather than simply continuing to mortgage the future by fostering unsustainable population growth without a corresponding rise in productivity. People (like the author of this article apparently) need to stop being so lazily short-sighted.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Watch Nicholas Negroponte on TEDTalks.
he eats for a week.
but give him the ability to learn and give him nearly unlimited access to information and knowledge and he can grow crops/produce food/orginize business/etc etc for a life time.
This isn't about solving the problem for a week. A temporary solution at best, training people to depend on foreign aid in the worst, but about empowering people to create real solutions for themselves.
Despite what people want to beleive, that african aid will save the world and make them heroes, the only people in a position to help Africans (and other third world nations) perminately is Africans (and natives to those same third world nations)
That's how it's going to happen. Africans helping Africans. Education and giving people the tools to learn to figure out solutions to their own problems is what is going to solve problems. (that and economic trade)
Not 'mister white european rich guy' coming around every few months and giving handouts of food and vaccinations. THAT is the real feel-good-happy-bullshit. Not saying it's not needed and people shouldn't be doing it. I am saying it's a bandaid, that's all. Your nursing the wounds (which in itself is valuable), not healing them.
It is wrong because it fails to take into account that the project may have (and probably has) sparked an increased awareness of the issues facing the third world and served to increase the number of people working to address these issues. So, even if the $100 laptops do end up serving as lights in some peoples homes (Hell, in the U.S. I use my laptop for light when the power goes out), the project, as a whole, may bring us closer to solutions for some of the worlds problems.
[I will not use any of my observations from China as examples because I have been, so often, reminded that I am entirely ignorant of China and that my understanding of my observations is entirely flawed]
Great post. The world is full of people who simply want to give money and forget (Live Aid, BandAid, etc.), but the $100 laptop is a committed (and self-sacrificing) effort to help people help themselves.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
if you dont spend it on a laptop.
one of my acquintances had worked in a peace mission for unicef in africa. she has informed me that the warlords (tribe leaders) there were confiscating the food at the distribution point, and selling it to the highest bidders or export it. only a token amount of it reached the hands of the intended needy targets.
its worse for the money - you cant track it easily. transfer some money to some local authority, and its gone.
Read radical news here
If you check the bottom of the MSN article, you'll see that it was hacked out by none other than our favorite random-babble-generator, John Dvorak.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Sometimes I think we need a good kicking. People sit in their comfy houses, with reguler electricity and their WholeFoods store nearby, and forget that for some people, life's damn hard, and getting harder.
You can indeed say they should have food instead of a laptop, however all that truckloads of food does is extend their dependence on the people who screwed them over to start with, by slaving them, stealing their resources, and more recently by causing pollution induced famines in Africa.
No, the best way to help them is to give them tools, be they shovels, or tech tools like computers, and let *them* decide what's best.
Perhaps foods would be nice as well, but since we live in food stuffed luxury while poorer nations starve and *still* struggle to pay off vast debts to international banks, I think that's just an insult 'ah, poor you, here, have our scraps'. It makes me sick, it really does.
So, um, I think the laptop things a good thing, although I think a rich company like microsoft should quit worrying about market share and domination, and cough up a few billion to buy a few cargo ships full of these laptops and communications equipment.
What was the grand promise of CD-ROM when it first appeared? You can store knowledge on it. Lots of it. Books, dictionaries, maps, almanacs, medical guides, encyclopedias. These laptops can do the same. Imagine the value of a handcranked laptop that lets a rural community look up: - Health and hygiene information. What do you do when a six month old develops a high fever and the nearest doctor is eight hours drive away? How do you ensure water and food is kept fresh and clean? How do you treat a wound caused by a sharp, dirty object? How do you recognize the symptoms of blood poisoning, parasitic infections, diabetes or degrading eyesight? - Farming best practices. How do you keep your livestock healthy? How can you protect your crops from insects and other harmful environmental influences? How do you take proper care of the soil on your plots? What should you plant when and using what technique; how much water will these crops require and what sort of return can you expect at different times of the year? - Maps and contact info. Where is the nearest hospital, government office, NGO office? How far is it to travel from town A to town B and what sort of transport or lodging is available? What should you look out for when travelling a certain route? - Law and rights. What do you do when you've borrowed money from someone rich in the community and he claims he owns the rights to your land when you can't repay the loan? Who do you call for legal advice or representation? How can you protect yourself and your community from other forms of harrassment? - Economic advice. How can you best use your skills to earn a living? What are your services worth? What other skills would be helpful to learn and how would you start to learn them? - Knowhow. How can you build a clean water reservoir for your community using limited means? How do you make sure that a structure errected to house people or livestock or store farming tools and other property won't get blown down by wind or eaten away by temperature changes, humidity and other environmental factors. These are just simple examples. You could expand on this and turn these laptops into a very comprehensive and useful information reservoir that helps people living in less than ideal conditions cope with all sorts of everyday problems.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
You could do the same thing with computers. A server + 20 x-terminals (don't laugh!) bolted into a box with a power supply and a satellite link. Perhaps networked so that you could access your account from anywhere.
The tricky bit is money. You never, ever, want to have any cash in your hands or they'll come after you with guns.
-- ac at home
...build a man a fire and he will be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
Seriously though, the $100 laptop idea seems well-intentioned, but it also seems to be based on a world view that is not very realistic. The amount that many Americans spend at Starbucks each year exceeds the GNI per capita of the world's least developed nations. These folks lack the basics - clean disease-free water, adequate food, medicine, and medical care - and their national infrastructures are a mess. Couple that situation with the African AIDS pandemic and a free laptop seems like a cruel joke.
The laptop may be a fine idea for some developing nations, but I personally believe that the associated hype has created a false impression that we are addressing a real problem...and the associated back clapping seems to overshadow the actual dire issues that these nations face.
TFA fails to mention real solutions for the African problem, which includes education. Education is what this laptop is meant for, education is why it is targeted at children and education will help generate much more than that intial $100.
If they overpopulate and cannot feed themselves, then feeding them with foreign money only worsens the problem. They will overpopulate more until eventually there WILL be famine. It's not a given RIGHT to recklessly multiply and expect someone to come to aid.
Best let the population self-regulate its size to manageable levels. Just stop feeding for 20 years and check the outcome. The only working form of development aid is education. Education will drop birth rate, improve living conditions etc.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.
'nuff said...
MSN can suck my balls, and G. Pascal Zachary should crawl back under the lump of crap he came from.
thats all I have to say on the matter, at the moment...
ism
... everything looks like a nail, so nerds went on with such vice, causing their plan to fail.
"Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?"
You mean like shelter, food and doctors?
The entire idea was just stupid. It might be an idea for 2nd world countries and the poorer areas of 'developed' nations, but for 3rd world? They have much more important things to worry about then having a computer.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Nah. Neither tools, nor money. Leave them alone to sort their shit out. In contrast to any of the aid programs I've ever heard of, this might actually work. If someone wants a laptop, he/she should buy it.
Just as a data point: all the clothes that are donated by the first world and end up in african markets destroy the market for the local textile business, thus increasing poverty, dependence, and the general feeling of misery.
And I don't get why people keep complaining that this is a waste of money and they would rather use their money to help those people get food and other types of support. Well there are already programs for that. Why not have another form of help in the area of education and technology. It can run side by side with the people trying to get food and medicine to these underdeveloped countries.
I think this program could help keep kids, as well as adults, somewhat familiar with the idea of computers. If one day their country is pulled out of the 3rd world era, then they won't be completely foreign to technology.
Can I bum a sig?
Those people should concentrate on productive activities, since those are the only ones that can help them out of the misery. Computers are a luxury item, really. It's like making _everybody_ in the western countries buy and fret for expensive cars, clothes, houses, cosmetics, unnecessary drugs, etc. And that is exactly what is going on.
How long do you think the world can afford to keep people occupied in writing (useless or semi-useless) computer applications? Not for very long.
People in the third world don't need computers. They need good general education (not some specific, like computer programming, which is basically logic + numeric mathematics), housing, utilities and infrastructure (these are missing in many parts of the US also!).
I just came back from living for a year in Mozambique. The poor there do not need a computer in each home. They don't have electricity in their homes, and quite frankly, they do not need electricity. Water is much more important than electricity. I saw communities where women have to walk 5km each way for water. They need better access to water. They need treatment for malaria. They need food. And, as far as children go, they need better access to basic education and teachers---a much better use of $100 than a computer. Oh, and they need textbooks. The university students didn't have access to textbooks so I'm pretty sure the elementary students don't have textbooks. And, while we are at it, they need to be able to go to school, but, unfortunately, most of the poorest kids have to work to help feed their families.
They do have needs that can be met by software and hardware developers. They need access to banking services. They need a property registration system so that they can have their land claims registered---that would let them use their land as collateral for micro-financing since they need capital to buy seeds, chickens, and other means of production so they can produce more and sell more.
I wonder if someone would compare how many resources are "wasted" on OLPC versus, say...Vista?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It was not sold because it was a 100$ laptop. If it was some 99$ or 199$ laptop, govt. of India would have been interested to purchase it. After all, party funds come from these purchases. They gave the crappiest reason for not purchasing the laptop i.e. it would be just another object to play. The real reason should have been that they don't have sufficient number of trained teachers. In my opinion, it doesn't take good amount of time to train teachers. The easiest way to spread literacy is definitely through computers and government of India doesnt want to do it. They will lose their cheap vote banks. They need baraks, bofors, missiles, nuclear energy, nuclear bombs etc. Even those things which can be done in India is imported from outside for 10 times the charge, because it brings value to the ruling parties. Well I'm from India.
Spam: Any activity on internet to gain popularity without paying to advertising companies like Google.
The idea to use "Moore's law" to produce the same functionality at progressively lower prices is a great idea on it's own.
I find it funny (or perhaps sad) that ppl will make such statements. This is akin to arguing that countries such as Brazil, India, or Chine should not persue space. History has already shown that persuing advancements is the only way to take care of your population. For instance, the 50's,60's was a time of advancement for America because we chose to persue such wild ideas as going to the moon.
America is now avoiding doing stem cell research because a few politicans have decided that life begins at conception (or that even eggs/sperm are life as well). In contrast, Europe and even Iran is pushing heavily into this and will shortly have such a lead over America for what we developed.
Personally, I salute the leaders at MIT as well as the countries that are investing in this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is yet another classic battle: Knowledge vs. Wealth (both financial and resource). I always come down on the side that says that knowledge is far more valuable than wealth since it frees you from the bondage of relying on others for most things. A simple example is the GNU/Linux project. For those of us who use Linux, we know that we are free of MANY of the things that Windows users are bound to Microsoft by. When you use GNU/Linux, you have to acquire a certain level of knowledge (that is actually fiarly easy to acquire if you make the effort) in order to do everything a Windows user can do. In exchange, you are no longer bound to the restrictions that Microsoft would impose on you had you not escaped. The same can be applied to things like knowing how to fix things around your house (more than just the basics), or how to take care of your medical issues with natural remedies that DO work (see my JE link below) and there by avoide bondage to the pharmaceutical industry. Anyone who is opposed to spreading knowledge instead of throwing money and resources at a population is either naive, or disingenuous. After all... which is better: Spending money over many many many generations to either teach people in developing nations that having lots of kids is generally a bad thing, or... letting them find out for themselves by sharing the knowledge with them through a simple low cost device? That's what the $100 laptop project is all about. It's about freeing the recipients from having to rely on a host of people and orgnaizations and instead, with a small investment, providing them with the ability to free themselves permanently by experiencing the power of shared knowledge from the people who are very willing to lend a hand with no strings. I applaud the $100 laptop project because for every one of the possible projects that the money could be wasted on, the potential to obviate them by sharing knowledge (about hydroponics, or solar power, or alternative medicines that may already be present in the culture, etc...) at what will turn out to be a fraction of the cost. But, I suspect that the people who stand to benefit from the expenditures on the other competing projects are largely opposed to this as they would lose a reason for being and therefore lose funding. Really good intentions there... Remember: knowledge is ALWAYS more valuable than wealth.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I work for an NGO in Yemen, and $100 will not feed 4 houses of 5 persons for 2 months in a rural area, much less a village for a year. I cannot believe that such an outrageously inaccurate statement can be made.
Dvorak has demonstrated that he is a blatant shill. His reporting is unbelievably amateurish (anyone notice that he only interviewed *critics of the OLPC program?) but he knows how to get slashdotted. So as long as we keep accidentally clicking on his articles he's going to keep getting paid.
Editors, we need to know when TFA is by Dvorak, so that we can ignore it. Even better: quit approving his articles.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I think the question is valid, as the financial resources are limited. Take for example the agricultural research institutes working for Africa: the money going in the overhyped genetic engineering meant that the funding went to this technology, at the expense of other research, which sometimes was more appropriate.
:) )
Anyway I see a big difference between people living in simple huts with no infrastructure, and poor urbanized people. (Poor as in low income
Oh, that smell? Its just the rancid stench of Microsoft propaganda. Sooner or later when things like these are said it eventually comes out that they had some involvement. Like when it was finally proven that they were behind SCO's ludicrous fight against Linux all along...like we didn't see that coming.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I have a long held belief that $100 is way to expensive.. for the mass people on this water ball of a planet.. How much of that $100 goes towards royality payments for patent and rights holders? How much does it cost to repair the thing? Did they get any software upgrades since buying it?
My idea target of $25 is still expensive... but that would reach more people...
We need to acknowledge with the present state of technology at least 3 billion of our fellow humans are net Exiles..
Pricing:
A PC must be equal or less in cost of 1 to 2 weeks of annual family income for a family to afford it..
Countries like China, India and other could do much, by establishing standards for royality free system (e.g., Linux, open hardware much like the Dragon chip but it could be any chip w/ a low cost and open specs).
China, India and others:
A) Set the Spec
B) Agree to buy X number per year for some #'s of years
This would create a market for machines with these specs and the annual purchase would drive economies of Scale.. and with that many units out there, it build up and at the same time lower the cost of SUPPORT, Repair, etc.
It's not enough to have open source software, you need open spec hardware.
Random Speculation:
What happens to chip fabs built with older 100 nano meter+ systems (just a guess), but when Intell or AMD has used up the value of a FAB, it should be shipped off to India and used to crank out lots of cheap, royality free chips...
http://www.hawknest.com/
A Microsoft-owned company (MSN) fins that a Linux-based computer is a waste of time.
What a surprise!
I am anarch of all I survey.
Why would Africans need computers when they could harvesting rice and coffee? (Said coffee which will probably end up in Western Kitchens anyway, but never mind.) One of the reasons that African nations in particular and developing country have troubled economy is that they lack the technical means to control their own means of distribution. A cheap laptop (running a home brewed *NIX) would a good start to setting up a modern means of distribution of goods . Also, consider whose the source -- the Finance and Business section MSN, AKA Microsoft's personal News arm. Do you honestly think that Microsoft wouldn't do a hit piece on $100 laptop? Do you think M$ wouldn't want to get Africans or Latin Americans hooked on their half assed products or on overpriced server boxes?
I was actually a little concerned about this issue until I saw who wrote the article. Its our old friend and "eyeball whore",
John Dvorak. While he is an intelligent and (usually) informed individual, his technology columns have degenerated with the rise of the Internet. Virtually everything he writes today has little to no bearing on actual reality. Most of his columns these days are designed to provoke and irritate just to get readers to look at his columns. Its degenerate journalism of the lowest tabloid nature
John, I'm sorry, years ago I was a fan, but since you've become an "eyeball whore" (see "crack whore") I've had to just stop believeing anything you write. Its very sad.
The majority of the african continent can and will use these PC's In fact I worry that they will become too popular and that the kids won't get them. True, there is famine and deep poverty in Africa, but its is not pervasive. It is small part of the entire continent. Further Africa is not the only place these units will be deployed. Even The Govenor of Massachusetts has expressed a desire to give one to every school child in Massaschusetts. other areas include South America, countries around the Pacific Rim, and Eastern Europe.
"Feed a family for a year" is a fish. A computer is a fishook.
These "journalists" also might want to consider the fact that not all the poor people in the world are teetering on the edge of starvation. Hundreds of millions have their basic needs satisfied and perhaps have electricity and/or running water but could do better if they had tools such as computers.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If I made pennies a day, had no food, and came across an item that I could probably sell to a westerner for 300$, I would sell it in an instant and live like a king.
If it belonged to someone else, I would steal it.
This idea is never going to work.
It attempts to bypass the market. So instead the laptops will end up being sold on ebay or similar where they'll go for the real market value of the device.
Deleted
Why do people still have this image that all poor people live in mud, and each what little grass they get? Maybe they have little grass skirts and spears? Until the West gets rid of the idea that the majority of the poor in the world have completely nothing, things won't get fixed.
The purpose of the Laptop isn't to be sent to the areas of the world where food and water are the biggest and most desperate needs. They are to be sent to places where most basic needs are taken care of, but the people could use an extra boost to educate themselves and get better jobs and raise themselves out of poverty. The idea that "there are worse problems, so if you don't help with the worst one, then you can't do any good" is one of the most flawed and disgusting ideas. It's the same argument that we shouldn't have gone into space until we feed every person on the planet. Some people have strengths other than giving hygiene kits or delivering rations to starving areas of the world. Why can we not use what we're best at (programming skills) to help out the poor in another way?
May I ask what the writer of this FUD has been doing to help the starving? You shouldn't be wasting your time writing anything, after all -- it's taking time away that you could be donating food to the hypothetical mud-hut-dwelling Africans.
Criticizing a do-gooder on the basis that the critic would prefer to use the do-gooder's resources in a different way is fundamentally flawed. That way lies paralysis and doing nothing. It's just a complicated way of saying "be reasonable--do things my way."
It's like criticizing the space program on the basis that it would be better to use the same resources to fight poverty in the U.S. That point is arguably true, but it's silly, because if we didn't have a space program the political reality is that those resources would not be used to fight poverty.
The altruistic impulse is not fungible. If you say to Negroponte "we don't want your laptops," he's not going to say, "Great, I'll just fold up the Media Lab and send all its funds to Oxfam."
I've faced this problem in deciding how to make personal charitable donations. How can one decide when there are so many worthy causes? How can one justify donating to the American Cancer Society when perhaps the American Heart Association would be a better use of resources? Is it frivolous to donate to the EFF instead of sending that money to UNICEF? The only answer is: these are the charities I donate to, you donate to whatever charities you wish.
Nobody knows how to solve the world's problems. If it were simple and obvious we'd just solve them. The $100 laptop is an interesting idea and it might do some good.
If not, I'd wager the amount of resources and "mind share" it's diverting from anything are utterly negligible compared to, say, the amount of resources and "mind share" being used in the U. S. to launch the PlayStation 3, or fulminate about O. J. Simpson's new book, or pursue the war in Iraq.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
No one can know what will work to help Africa, with its many, and now many ancient, basic problems.
What has G. Pascal Zachary actually done to help? He's been an academic/journalism/lecturer Africa expert watcher for a long time, but Africa is even worse in most ways than when he began his career. Where's the evidence that his opinions, part of the "help Africa" status quo, are any more likely to work than a new project that focuses on a quantum leap in empowering a new generation of Africans?
--
make install -not war
What happens after a year of feeding this people instead of getting the Laptop? The problem starts again. This is a long term project, education is gonna make this kids get their own food by themselfs in the future...
I searched but couldn't find the exams nor the braindumps for the certification on mcp site.
There is a saying along the lines of "don't give a starving man a fish, give him a pole and teach him how how to fish".
This tiny laptop might be an excelent way for people in developing areas to get some education and release themselves from the hunter-gatherer thinking. People have to eat in order to survive, it's a fact. But either they evolve through the means of some education, or they remain stagnant as a population, and they will continue to require being fed.
There are already food programs. We need to invest in making those people more self suficient. Give them the tools to evolve their social patterns, and they might actually be able to do so! But bear in mind that it is not in everyone's best interest that it happens that way. There are many things and many people who rely, for instance, in the fact that the indigenous populations of the largest part of Angola and Mozambique remain ignorant and fighting for the most basic needs. Remove those shackles and they might actually start thinking of higher purposes, like quality of life. And that is a big, big threat.
The 100$ laptop program is something never attempted before, and it's also something that threatens to improve the status quo in the developing areas of the world. I wouldn't be surprised if some groups actively fought it, and we can already see something like that in the media.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
OLPC is opposed by the same mindset, and probably by many of the same people, who oppose the exploration of space and other long-term investments in the future of mankind. Their short-sighted view has been with us throughout time and represents a sociological counterpoint to the potential dangers of leaving the shelter of the cave, of hunting instead of gathering, of building a boat or a bridge or of seeing what's beyond that distant mountain. The One Laptop Per Child initiative isn't "about" laptops any more than Columbus' venture was "about" boats, but you may be sure Ferdinand and Isabella were told they could buy a lot of gruel for the cost of those ships and the men who sailed them.
How are Africans going to eat if they can't participate in the world economy?
The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop?
No, actually, for $100 you could buy food from other places and give it to the villagers for free, killing any chance of any of the villagers ever becoming a farmer and working to feed themselves and each other.
Or you can take a laptop, load it up with the latest in farming techniques and guides, and give it and a microloan for the seed and equipment to people who want to work, and short circuit thousands of years of shitty farming and learning how to grow things from scratch.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The best thing about the US$100 laptop is that it costs less than one month of brazilian minimum wage (about US$160 today). A cheap computer around here costs about 3 times more than the minimum wage. When poor people are able to buy a laptop without having to cut all expenses but basic housing, food and transportation for one or two years they can improve their lives, even if a little bit.
Disclaimer: If I disagree with you I'm probably trolling...
Uncle Milty Friedman, the free-market radical, has finally bit the turnip, maybe his execrable idea that the world is a zero-sum game
Umm, the idea of Milton Friedman and other economic liberals is that the world is NOT a zero sum game, which is why the fact that we are wealthy is taking exactly nothing away from people in the third world (who were poor when we were poor, and would still be poor if we became poor again).
If you are going to spout bullshit, at least you could try to not be 100% wrong in the first sentence...
First of all it's a bit sad to see that this article is on MSN MoneyCentral, as Microsoft was initially interested in contributing to OLPC, then lost interest and claimed it was nonsense. Thus, this article sounds a bit like "Teslas million-dollar folly", a smear campaign by J.P.Morgan to denounce Nikola Teslas work on the Wardenclyffe Tower, a project to transmit radio waves and wireless power.
Second, why should any third world countries families "mind share" (which reminds me a lot of Learys "neuronal time" concept, reworked for wall street nerds) be more valuable than mine? And how does electricity relate to a tool that allows to process information? Are they essentially saying that people need food more than a device that allows them to become computer literate? They need both! This is the usual patronizing snotty perspective known from industrial countries.
Third, I've talked to my sister, who has worked as a development aid volunteer in Kameroun and Guatemala, about the laptop. I wanted to know her perspective on the idea, since she knows the people living there. She said, they have a tendency to just call a device broken even if only one button is jammed. So there has to be a technician available who can fix these things. They also would rather sell their laptop instead of using it. So they can't take the device with them. But all in all she thinks it's a good idea and understands its importance.
Do not trust this signature.
That every laptop comes with instructions om how to google. A person in a third world country might try strings like: "how do i clean/desalinate drikning water", "how do i prevent getting aids", "wtf is a solar oven and how do i make one so that i don't have to spend all frikkin day gathering wood", "how do i play freerolls", "are there any crops besides opium i can grow on my farm NOT food since food grown in my country has to compete with imports at zero price". etc, etc.
FRA: STFU GTFO
The term Third World is a handwawing reference to all those nameless poor buggers carrying the fat asses from the Old as well as the New World on their shoulders. They deliver the fuel to our economies needed to stay on top (of them!), but nobody had given a damned thought of identifying who they were, or reflect on that they existed at all.
... The works.
The Old World refers to Europe, including the inheritage of Greek math, Italian book-keeping, classical arts and music
The New world is literally supposed to be all of the Americas, but admittedly the US is what comes to mind first.
Russia (with or without the prefix "Soviet") would be part of the Old World.
send + more == money?
It's unfortunate that Mr. Dvorak didn't talk with the proponents of and contributors to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. He admits he depended on information on a Web site. Normally, this isn't a problem, but...unlike an organization with a for-profit motive with which Mr. Dvorak is used to dealing, there are no PR flacks in this small group of people doing the work. There isn't an army of copywriters keeping the OLPC web site up-to-the-minute. The focus of the OLPC army, about a platoon in strength, is getting the laptop built and distributed, to a price, to a performance level, to a quality level. There are no information officers here.
As a consequence, Mr. Dvorak's factual basis for his opinions appear to be flawed. That's the problem with fast-moving, lean projects that don't have a profit motive: the worker-bees don't budget time to spoon-feed journalists.
I base this critique on the facts shown at a presentation I attended last week on the project and its current status. During that presentation, many of Mr. Dvorak's criticisms were answered in full. I'll run down the factual points, based on the information I gleaned from that presentation. I don't vouch for absolute accuracy, as I wasn't taking notes, and I'm not part of the project. Keeping those caveats in mind:
* Justification: Mr. Dvorak doesn't touch on this issue at all, except in the negative and through the words of another person. He missed the one reason this project is interesting to the governments of the developing nations: it saves money in education.
Mr. Dvorak, have you looked at the price of school textbooks these days? How much does your local school spend, per year, on books for their kids? In developing countries, the textbook cost may be lower than here but it's still high compared to, say, food.
(N.B.: The situation in college is even worse. I leave research on that issue as an exercise to the reader, as most of the hits on Google about textbook pricing focus on higher education.)
You say, Mr. Dvorak, "with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year" but that same $100 doesn't cover educating ONE child for ONE year. You want to fill their stomachs, but starve their brains?
The OLPC project got the facts from the horse's mouth, the governments who have to somehow educate their children in order to raise the standard of living in their country. The cost of the laptop, roughly $20/year for the five-year life of the laptop, is less than the cost of the books needed to teach the kids. Throw in the infrastructure costs (development of electronic textbooks, "libraries", access points and their connections to a country-wide network) and the country still sees a savings.
Interestingly, like most "problems", it comes down to money.
* Manufacturing cost: While the presenter didn't provide a complete bill of materials for the laptop, the cost projections for building the laptop in million quantities falls well below $100 at the current time. Further cost reduction is possible as the laptop matures. The cost projection shown by the presenter was verified by members of the audience who have been on the front lines of manufacturing products like this laptop.
How much lower can the price go? You know as well as anyone the cost curve over lifetime of a computer product. Is $50 possible?
* Maintenance: Photos of the prototypes shown at the presentation show a modular approach very similar to that used by IBM in making the PS/2 Model 50 personal computer (and *not* used in virtually every PC made today). The only tool required to service the machines is a single screwdriver. Kids in the US, UK, Canada, and other developed countries have no problems servicing computers *not* designed to be serviced easily by untrained personnel. So the only infrastructure required is a way to get spare parts to those who need them.
* Networking: The laptops use mesh networking to communicate with each other, and to access points provided as part of the
Couldn't agree more. The article exposes an incredible undercurrent of racism:
The assumption that the whole 3rd world is sitting, waiting for us to give them food cos they're busy doing nothing but starving to death is unacceptable. Saying that providing cheap, workable technology misses the need of "these people" denies "these people" any help at all, especially when the author things that you can feed a village for a year on $100 (you cannot. Try $5000).
Just as an aside, if he's so convinced there are thousands of villages sitting around, waiting for him to feed them, I wonder how many villages he's fed in his lifetime? Or do "Africa watchers" take the same view as "nature watchers," believing that involvment is interference?
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
It's almost as bad as this episode of futurama
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
And I don't get why people keep complaining that this is a waste of money and they would rather use their money to help those people get food and other types of support.
Because it's always more fun to spend other people's money yourself. Why, I was just reading this web site that talks about these same sort of issues. Anything relating to space, wars, desktop environments, operating systems, video games and systems, etc all comes down to the same things, "Why do X when we should be feeding the poor in our own country? Damn that Bush!" In reality though (RL for your MMO folks) merely throwing endless amounts of money at any problem does not solve it, it just makes the problem "fixers" find new ways to request yet more money.
Can the article be any more condescending? Why try to reinforce the 3rd world stereotype. There are cities, with cars, buildings, offices, airports, etc in just about every 3rd world country.
What about those families that are cram packed into an apartment and barely make ends meet?
Even if one of them ends up in a hut like the article suggests, this will probably be a turning point in their culture, much like a renaissance.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
..already coming out of this project. And really, they got a decent functional self powered wireless mesh equipeed solid state laptop down to 150 bucks so far. There's good hardware and good software and good alternate energy tech here, good communications (the laptops are designed with central wireless servers in mind as well, so a small community only needs one good internet connection to get it spread out). Looks like a success so far to me. And I am not seeing how it is going to fail, it is an educational project, direct from their main mission statement page, and even just as an e-reader-what is wrong with giving kids hundreds of books? You are going to ship dead trees books in these numbers for that cheap? I doubt it. And it goes far beyond just being a dedicated ebook reader, it is a functional decent little computer.
Dvorak is a tard, can't see the bigger picture. MS (Gates commented before anyway) wants to do something similar with cellphones and tiny screens, this looks more practical for its intended function. AFAIK, education has always been a "good idea", this is just one way to go about gettng the infrastructure in place, something that can be updated and used and won't be obsoleted in short order. Look at just the bayless windup radio, that was a huge success, just getting normal one way *radio* that could function without expensive batteries or mains power available to a lot of places made a difference for people,and this OLPC project goes far beyond that.
I stay in South Africa, and believe that this fact has quite a revelance to the topic being discussed. You see, South Africa is in the somewhat unique situation of being a 2nd world country, due to the fact that large parts of the country was left to slowly tick by on their own why smaller regions were actively developed - Apartheid of course.
From our perspective I am very sure that the $100 laptop project is a VERY GOOD THING. For instance, take the schooling system. Schools that, in the previous "regime", recieved a lot of funding from the government are mostly in a position to be able to provide subjects like Computer Studies - due to having computer labs.
The other schools, however, that were previously neglected, now needs this infrastructure too. Problem is, as we all know, computers and (proprietry) software is expensive (in a "developing country" sense) and there are also just so many of these schools out there that it really is a challenge for government. It is being done - I was for a small time involved in our Gauteng Online project, whose aim is to provide every school in Gauteng (previously the PWV region) with computer labs and to connect these to the internet. It seemed like a simple enough project, but when one starts thinking about the numbers involved it starts to become a bit daunting.
Say we look at a PC that would perhaps cost about $350 (I am converting here from our currencty ZAR so I am not sure what an average PC would cost in USD terms!) - ten PCs for ten schools already amount to $35000. Challenge this with a machine that will cost $100 - thats a saving of $25000 already!
And this is just one small factor that i think is relevant here - others include mobility which is always a good thing, the fact that it runs linux (more encouragement for innovation i believe!) etc etc.
Ive seen many comments on here about feeding the family for $100 or giving them a computer to help them farm?!? my grandfather farmed through the great depression, and last time I checked he never had a computer. a computer is not the be all end all. give them a real education, teach them to read, teach them when to plant, what to plant, what to plant with, how to irrigate, how to tend, deinfest, and finally harvest, None of that can be trained out of a manual, it requires hands-on knowledge.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
At the store where I work, we regularly have budget laptops, in the $350 range, and still we get people asking if there's nothing cheaper, these laptops being the absolute cheapest we have. I swear next time I get asked this, I'm going to point them to the $50 kiddy Superman speak-and-spell laptops we sell.
The entire GDP of Nigeria is fourteen hundred dollars?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Well There's a another side to this. This project has a heavy emphasis on open source which means those kids will grow up learning computers through open source .not the 'black box microsoft suff. Maybe this is what microsoft is most afraid of. It will be really hard to sell the microsoft philosophy to a open source generation.
This is so true! Many places in the US for example are in need of many many things. However, they still have parks and camps and programs to beautify the city. If all you did was ever focus on the immediate dire needs (and there always is plenty to focus on) you'd never move forward on a higher level.
Education is one of those things. Educated people can solve their own problems. Constantly throwing money and solving their problems for them temporarily doesn't help anything. These places need to move to a higher level. People keep forgetting the $100 laptop is less about computer ownership and more about a device that can hold massive amounts of education material.
And I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, because it's been said a million times before... This thing isn't really meant for people who are living in a tent and this is their only source of light. It's meant for countries who've moved past that stage. No one expects someone dying of starvation to have one. However, someone in a country where the knowledge of purifying water could mean life or death, even if they have a belly full of food.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Financial resources are in no way limited. Economics 101...Some one has to always be in a position to need some thing from some one else for our systems to work. Basically all of them rely on this concept. Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
As far as I'm concerned this is just Microsoft kicking a good project because of the injection of Linux it will bring to the developing world. And don't lie to yourself; if we really wanted to give help to these people we would do more than a token effort - and maybe this is one of those ways.
I ate your fish.
$100 laptops aren't geared towards starving childrem with no food, water, electricity or shelter. This is an effort geared at the aformentioned nations who's problem lies in technological infrastructure. Argentina, China (Yes, Xhina is still considered a developing country), Brazil. Chile, Venezuela, Thailand, Egypt, Mexico, former second-world ex-soviet states, Nigeria, Tunizia, etc are all countries who don't have problems feeding, clothig, or sheltering their populations, back lack IT infrastructure, or the funds to impliment it, and realize the potential cheap laptops have in terms of education and improving ifrastrure, strengthening the IT industry, etc, which iswhere their problems lie.
$4-500 for a PC isn't much by western standards, but its a significant chunk of the average working class person's income in these countries, enter the $100 laptop. Not surprisingly, theze are the typed of countries interested in the project.
Yes, obviously, clothing, food, shelter, electricity and heat are much more important than lapstops, in countries where these problems exist. BUT THAT'S NOT WHO THIS PROJECT IS AIMED AT. The western world serious;y needs to get over itself and it's absolutely pretentious misconception that the entire third/developing world consists entirely of starving, dying, disease-ridden, naked. homeless people.
A little history is in order. the concept of the three world is a relic from the cold war. The First world consisted of states aligned with the Capitalist west. The second world consisted ofthe Soviet block, ad the third world consisted of the non-aligned countries, e.g. everyone else. Since thefall ofthe Soviet Union, the second world no longer exists, and of the countries that made it up, few became part ofthe first world, and the rest part of the third world. Given that most ofthe third world was, relativeto the first world, underdeveloped, theterm became synonymous with "developing countries".
Its the propagation of the ill-conceived notion that third-world/developing == starving, sick, unclothed people, with no exception, coupled with the west's resulting refusal to see indoividual countries for what they are, preferimng insteadto fall back on the previous misconception, that the majority of international development efforts have been resounding failures. (see Indonesia's "green revolution" and the resulting famine/economic near-collapse for a prime example).
Yes, in regard countries who DO, in fact, fall under the classic image of a "third world country", this propject is a wasyte of resources (which is precizely why it isn't aimed at those countries). Food. medicine, clean water, etc are muchly needed, and should (and are) of the highest priority in terms of development. NOBODY is disputing this.
But to the states at the upper-end of the third world, the nations who's taken care of the aggriculture/shelter/clothes/water/etc side of development, and who now need to set up infrstucture and branch out into other industries, this is a fucking godsent.
PS. I'm a westerner, myself. I just don't have my head stuck so far up my ass that I can't see the world outide, yet insist on generalizing it in black and white terms.
Considering the USA, the Brits, the Arabs and countless other contries have raped Africa (in as many ways as one can count) - for hundreds of years - it's pay back time. The USA and the others involved in screwing Africa need to each give one trillion dollars a year for the next 10 years. That's the beginning!
Then they (the Africans) won't need White Man Do Gooders - once they have the stolen resources rewturned - back in their hands - that's if the money went to ordinary people (not to the idiot politicans).
Then all "we" whites can stop sending over other whites to tell Africans not to screw - because if they do stop - then "they" won't get AIDS. What a scam! First brutalize Africans in every way possible for hundreds of years - and then when they have nothing left - no food, no resources, half the male population enslaved and shipped around the world like cattle, use the continent as a dump for USAS waste etc. .... etc. - and then blame the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing for their destoyed immune systems.
By the way, the USA developed "well" for a hundred years without a single computer.
No, Mr. Pedantic, the GDP per capita is $1400, which of course is obvious to everyone, especially as I pointed out the billions in extra oil revenues.
Or, as in this case, a way of saying "you are making me feel guilty about my worthless life of punditry so I'm going to criticise your efforts without examining them first".
Weirdly enough, the space program has done a lot to fight poverty; at least in the USA anyway. It's been a net job creator and generated more cash than the taxes spent on it.
Yup. Actually, he'll say "well I know plenty of kids who do want my laptops so get out of the way." It's not like he hasn't already piloted the project (the nay-sayers never actually do any research, so they don't know that) successfully. The OLPC project came about because Negroponte saw the actual transformation used laptops (from eBay, incidentally) made in real world situations, and he determined that the major problem with them was power and network availability. The OLPC hardware addresses those exact problems with mesh networking and muscle-powered generators (no, there's no hand-crank , that was an old idea that didn't work out - the generators will be foot-powered and easily convertible to use other mechanical power sources).
Bingo. It's your time, your money, if somebody else is going to dictate what you do with it that's tyranny. Still, I will point out that the best places to put your altruistic giving are Habitat and especially Heifer. These organizations do not perpetuate poverty and bad governments by feeding people who would otherwise starve or rebel, they give people a chance to better themselves so that they can improve their lives and the lives of those around them.
Incidentally, I'm highly amused at the rash of "OLPC failure" stories making the rounds these days. The OLPC project is (so far) a raging success! It seems that some people don't want it to be successful, though, so they simply redefine the goals of the project to something they are not, and that way they can claim failure.
Sure - you can give a village $100 worth of food - and if they ever actually get the food - and if it's not stolen by the local warloads - or the cash skimmed off by some corrupt politician - or eroded by all of the administrative overheads - then they'll be much better off for a year. They'll probably also stop planting crops too. If you keep it up for enough years - they won't even know how to plant crops. What happens the next year and the year after and for the next 100 years?
You could build them a generator - but who will service it? Where will they get gas to power it? OK - make it a windmill - but still, who will fix it when it breaks?
You can go on propping up these failed third world economies by paying 'welfare' - or you can try to fix the root problems and let them support themselves.
In the long term, what these countries need more than anything else is better education. With education, they can pull themselves out of mire that currently drags them down. That's a long term, sustainable, solution. $100 doesn't buy many text books - but it does buy Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg...it gets them keyboard skills. You can sit in a little hut in the middle of a drought blasted desert and so long as you have Internet access, a clockwork laptop and the right skills, you can earn vastly more money than you could ever earn any other way. You can earn enough buy your own generator - or you can learn enough to realise that in your environment, a windmill would be a better choice (or not) - you can learn how to service it. Even if you are a farmer in Kenya - you can learn what the current price of coffee in various markets - you can negotiate prices directly with StarBucks instead of being paid 1% of the value by some sleazy middle-man.
But they can't do that without education and a way to reach out to the outside world.
So - give a man a fish or teach him to fish?
www.sjbaker.org
There doesn't seem to be a clear consensus on newer terms, but terms like "developed", "industrialized", "newly industrialized", "developing", "under developed", etc. are much more descriptive.
"Wait for us, we're the leader"
I think that is what MS is all about, when it comes to new technology.
Whenever someone does something interesting they want to take over they spread FUD and tell everyone that all they need to do is to wait for MS to come out with their new cool solution.
That means that a lot of clueless people (read: Everybody who hasn't learned to ignore MS) will wait and eventually might even be fooled into buying Microsofts shoddy knockoff.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Typical that a Microsoft body would put out any article like this. They thought it was a great concept when the idea that Windows might be the OS running the machines. After being snubbed in favor of Linux they have come out swinging over and over again.
The mesh networks that can be created will allow poor people in this area to organize themselves in a way they have never been able to before. The purpose of the laptops is to be used as an education tool. The very first thing you need to do when you are attempting to bring a 3rd world nation into modern times is to educate them.
Do they need to be fed first? Sure they do. I seriously doubt that anyone will be providing laptops to people who are starving to death. What they will do is find people who are in need of this technology and provide it to them. Feeding people can only save them from starving not from ignorance. You can feed them forever or you can educate them.
If you must!
What about the source?
Here is an article on the MicroSoft Network, dissing a computer based on another operating system. My experience has been there is almost no such thing as objective reporting. I guess I'll have to check out what they have to say on the Fox network, where they guarantee me it's "fair and balanced".
The reason he's dissing it..is because he's a Microsoft lackey, and the laptop project uses Linux.
The last thing Microsoft want is a whole generation/country of people who learn and associate linux with desktop computing. Its all about mindshare. Most Americans don't even realise Windows is an OS and not just an integral part of the computer. Thats what Microsoft want the rest of the world to think too.
Yeah, the article has a lot of FUD in it, and you're right on the 'feeding a village for $100' idiocy. (Maybe if their villages numbered about 5 people each and they ate nothing but bread and water for a year... And sometimes skipped the bread.) But assuming that the article is racist on the basis of the term 'these people'? How is that racist? Would you have preferred "Africans"? "Black people"? What? I'm willing to bet that if this whole subject was shifted to helping impovrished, starving (white) people in 3rd world Soviet Bloc countries, you wouldn't even bat an eyelash. And who is assuming that the 3rd world is sitting on their starving asses waiting for philanthropic 1st world handouts?
Maybe you hadn't noticed, but much of the 3rd world is starving, and not from any lack of effort on their part. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, "Well, if those goddamned Africans would just get off their lazy butts and make some food, there wouldn't even be a problem!" No, most people say, "Well, maybe if we gave them some food (and some medical aid too, since half their continent is dying of AIDS), they would have more chance to devote time and energy to other things. Like education, sanitation, and infrastructure." We in the 1st world are not just throwing money at the place and giving ourselves a pat on the back for good charity (though certainly there are many who do that [see: famous rich people]). There are groups and people who use their money and help out with food (and not just handing them some foodstuffs and hoping for the best. Actually teaching them to farm and giving them the impliments needed to do so). Groups and people who help out with medical aid, with the building of schools and hospitals and sanitation facilities, et cetera. And generally, it seems to be working.
It sounds to me like you're some hyper-PC, ultrasensative bozo who leaps at any opportunity to shout "Racism!" from the highest peak.
I suspect the idea's supporters are trying to replicate their youthful experiences in affluent suburbs. Top=down benevolence often works that way.
Seriously?
"The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."
What the hell? Why does he get to say what the people on that project are doing? I have no idea if it will end up being a good idea, and neither does he. All I know is that the amount that I was able to learn on a given day became basically unbounded on the day that my family got their first computer, and it's probably been the single most important learning tool I've ever used. That's why I became a programmer. That and because I get to make a lot of money for very little effort.
Still. This complaint is that the people making the OLPC could be doing something better. This coming from a guy who's spent HIS mindshare in life writing a bunch of occasionally-pointed articles (yeah, that's going to provide electricity more quickly, good thinking). It's easy to complain.
Now if it weren't Dvorak complaining - if my idol, Paul Graham, came out talking about how bad of an idea it was - I'd at least start to examine it. But if I listened every time Dvorak said something, I'd end up quite the idiot.
The economy will tell us whether this is a good idea. Not immediately, and it'll be an interesting example of a quasi-free market, since the only people involved in the market are about forty potential governments. Still, time will tell a lot better than MarketWatch.
-knewter
if you lived in a third world hell hole and someone gave you $100 - What would you spend it on?
Anyone with more than half a brain think the answer would be a laptop?
Of course not.
Honestly - what are the critics of the $100 laptop program doing for third world nations themselves? So what if they don't think it's a good idea? - nobody asked them to help.
How about the kibitzers put their energy into something besides screwing with people already working?
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
...be feeding these kids? if $100 could feed a village for a year, imagine what $1 billion (us) could do tomorrow?
so why aren't these people being helped by Bill *now*?
'E-mail us your comments on this article' goes straight to investor@microsoft.com
The $100 laptop: What went wrong? Answer it doesn't run a Microsoft product.
I too wonder of the authors have ever been to the third world. If all if the third world lived in huts they would have a point.
I recently visited one of poorer regions of Brasil. People don't live in huts there. They live in brick houses, they have electricity, but few home phones, to give a picture. But education is a problem: they can't afford it. A significant part of the third world doesn't live in huts. That's exactly the kind of people the $100 laptop project is amied at.
Now, I'm inclined to think that MSN has been able to find a few hotshots that where willing to support Microoft party-line.
Today, Microsoft's main competitive tool is lies, footdragging, spin, PR (that is short for PRopaganda).
You can just hang around outside all day... or you can sit at your computer and do something that matters.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Prime Directive ftw !!!!!!
The article was actually written by John Dvorak for MarketWatch, not Microsoft. MSN MoneyCentral is just rehosting it. MarketWatch is a standard business news source.
> the actual dire issues that these nations face.
You mean the kind of thing that can only be solved by decent education?
Stick a bunch of experienced and well educated people together in some bombed out back-to-the-stone-age apocalyptic landscape, and they can turn it into a great nation in under 10 years (see: germany, wirtschaftswunder).
Stick a bunch of uneducated bums together in a rich nation, and all you get is death and destruction. (see: barbarian invasions of rome).
Ergo, education is important.
Now for educations we need schools and libraries. Those things are expensive. For instance, we could donate the print version of britannica to a school or library someplace, but that costs about $1400, and you'd just have the one. We could also equip a small class with 14 OLPC laptops, with wikipedia preloaded, and which you can still install a lot of other software on, and/or perhaps the laptop could already access the web.
Tough choices, tough choices. I wonder what we should do!
Why not at least make those we tread on daily (with or without our knowledge) have slightly more meaningful lives and give them one of the best resources around - knowledge.
..." saying.
Actually, there's a straightforward answer to such rhetorical questions. Much of the explanation for the abject poverty in many parts of the world is a local social/political system that keeps the people in poverty. And the main tool for doing this is ignorance. People in power tend to understand the old "Knowledge is power" saying, and maintain their hold by blocking general access to information from the outside world.
Those who object to the OLPC project are basically arguing for keeping the people in ignorance by maintaining their lack of access to knowledge.
Granted, people need food, shelter, medicine, etc. Giving such things does help them in the short term. But unless you can also fight the local power structure by giving the people access to information and knowledge, your charity is only short-term, and doesn't address the underlying problems. It's the old "Give a man a fish
Of course, the OLPC laptop isn't itself a total solution. It also needs the infrastructure to deliver information. Unless it is accompanied by the hardware needed for Net access, it won't accomplish nearly its full potential. So rather than discussing why we should give the people food and medicine, which existing relief organizations know how to do, we computer geeks should be discussing how we can also bring them Internet connectivity.
Along with the (linux-based) OLPC laptops, with their wireless mesh comm hardware, we need to find the local proto-geeks and supply them with (linux-based?) server machines that can function as gateways. And we need to figure out how to link those servers to the Internet. The best way would be to do what we can to help those local geeks manage it all themselves.
If we can pull this off, the local power structures won't know what hit them until it's too late. This is happening in places like China right now, where the local powers are fighting their rearguard actions against the likes of google and wikipedia, in the ongoing battle to keep their people ignorant. With a bit of effort, we can bring this to the rest of the world.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
the idea of Milton Friedman and other economic liberals is that the world is NOT a zero sum game
Ummm, unless there's a giant spigot I missed in geography class, the world IS a zero-sum game. Except for the sun. Damn sun, pouring energy into an otherwise closed system, ruining a perfectly good blanket statement.
You left out something. "You can feed them forever or you can educate them" - until they starve to death, or die of AIDS, which is a huge problem in 3rd-world countries today. Mesh networks are awesome, sure - but do those in 3rd world countries know how to start up a mesh network? These aren't IT pros and Linux gurus. We're handing underpowered laptops to people who have absolutely no idea how to go about using them. If we're going to honestly educate and support these people in using this technology, the cost will be far more than $100 a pop. And, in the end, they still can't eat the laptop, and it still won't cure HIV, and it still won't make clean water, and it still isn't a hospital or a school or electricity. I think the problem with the whole OLPC idea is that people really aren't thinking about what life is really like in these places, they aren't thinking through what's needed and how best to use it. And while, yes, the OLPC program can go on side-by-side with other programs, they would have done much better to donate the funds to organizations doing more useful work. In our rush to buy bigger TV's, faster PC's and shinier SUV's, our vision is clouded; we start to assume this is everyone's struggle, the struggle for a new couch and a new house and a new boat. But a huge portion of the world's population is still struggling for simple survival; for food, shelter, clean water, and any measure of health care. They're struggling, and they're losing. They have more important concerns than a laptop.
[Z?]
This article sums up my thoughts very accurately. People in developing nations want shelter, they want warmth, clean water, and ample food. They do not care about wikipedia, webcams, and LCD's.
It is elitist programmers like myself that get caught up in bringing 'my' work to those less fortunate, and we are totally out of touch with the reality of the situation.
And besides, give people these laptops or whatever they are, and you can bet the ruling paramilitary force in the area will confiscate every single one.
Oh, and good thing it runs OSS, that way these tribes can audit the source code.
I mean, WTF?!?!
Spoken like an ignoramus who has never actually read or thought about a single idea that Friedman published. It's too bad intelligence and empathy for the recently departed doesn't trickle down, because you could use some under that rock you crawled out from under.
"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime"
That is why the laptops are not a horrible idea. If they learn to perform the tasks to provide for themselves and better techniques of farming through education, then this will be anything but a failure.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Two of the things that lead to the growth in the wealth and productivity of a society are the ease of communications and the wide availability of knowledge. Jared Diamond makes a similar argument in his widely read book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." The $100 laptop project offers features for communications (i.e., email, IM, VoIP) and for knowledge dissemination (built in wikipedia, web access).
Over a hundred years ago, when Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of free public libraries in many slum-laden US cities, I am sure many well meaning people said the money could have been better spent on providing food to eat, coal to heat homes, improved public sanitation, etc. But the knowledge that many a slum kid derived from those libraries helped them get an education and escape from poverty.
A full library, with its costs for books, a building, and caretaker, costs much more than the $100-150 of OLPC, so it seems reasonable to try the $100 laptop approach.
Would you most kindly care to give us a reference, showing what worlds Alfred Sauvy actually had in mind at the time, regarding the worlds preceeding the third?
send + more == money?
Others have already pointed out that you have no idea what Milton Friedman actually said. As for the claim that critics of OLPC really hate poor people, this has zero evidence to back it up. Here's an astounding thought: maybe they sincerely believe there are better ways to help the poor?
Thank you for confirming what I too was thinking. Calculation didn't seem to add up, not even close.
"First point: FUN is not the goal of learning. Please consider that, Mr. Baude [he is responding to another blog]. The goals of formal education are to discipline the mind, establish correct methods of problem-solving and analysis, and provide an essential baseline of (systematized) knowledge for further growth. Learning can be immediately rewarding and interesting, but even when it is not - or especially when it is not - school curriculums should still work toward these goals, not give up and let students watch nominally interactive multimedia presentations, frittering away school hours that would otherwise be spent - groan! - reading textbooks." More at Udolpho.com: "Computers, huh! What are they good for?."
Anybody remember the colleges that were giving away laptops to every incoming student? That really took off, huh?
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
the people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful.
This is the guns vs butter economics analogy. Like it, this argument is flawed. As cows can't make guns, most hackers aren't equiped to solve the hunger problem in poor villages.
Although I don't disagree that hunger is a greater problem than the lack of information technology, to say that work on both uses the same scarce resources, is perhaps a stretch.
... or bullshit filter. But I didn't need to repeat myself.
This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.
Why am I not surprised?
Care about privacy? Read this!
and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for life. They are trying to teach these people in order to raise their standard of living. Get a clue MSN. Am I wrong?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
those economic resources could not have produced food, so they would otherwise be an untapped outlet. If all the money going into a project like that went into sending food over, you'd probably choke the food supply and incredibly diminish the value of the money you spent on it.
An interesting point - money is fluid, but resources are not. But there's something that the " Oooh Noes - they need clean water and underwear first!!!" crowd completely fails to miss...
As my father in law (and former businessman) says, "Sometimes you have to choose between making the house payment and the truck payment. And the house payment won't make the truck payment...". What he means by this is that when resources are tight, invest first in those things that improve your resource situation. The work-truck helps bring in money. The house does not. So, invest in that which will best improve your financial situation!
And that, to me, is much of what this $100 laptop is all about. True, not every impoverished soul will get one, and it's distinctly possible that only the "upper-poor" will actually benefit from this project. But the computer is the "work truck" of the present and future.
I type this while sitting in a Hilton hotel lobby in South San Fransisco. My wife and I are on a 2.5 day weekend getaway, with no specific plans for anything. (She's sleeping in) I have delicious coffee on the pottery table in front of me, beautiful plants all around me, and all of this is earned by what I type on this Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, armed with an Internet connection. (and yes, it runs Linux, Fedora Core)
A laptop with an Internet connection is an information feed of an invaluable nature. Can you imagine what a modem-speed Internet connection would do to expand the minds and viewpoints of the geographically challenged? What simple act of 'surfing the websites' can do to people whose hope is bleak, who lack the information necessary to solve their own problems? Information that can be used to learn how to purify their water, or fertilize their lands so that they provide more food. Or, for that matter, perhaps (as I do) use the laptop itself to directly provide income!
Sorry, but I'm with the OLPC project on this one - they'll either succeed in meeting their goals, or they won't succeed as much as they'd like. But I can't see how this project could truly fail.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I have doubts about this project of my own - in sufficient volume, the real cost of books is about $2 each, so you're trading 50 books for the gadget; but there's just no question that while some places could use 50 almost infinitely rugged (by comparison) books more than a laptop, there are also many, many places that could use the laptop.
2 0article_%20%20Human%20Development.txt
A very small percentage of the world is actually unable to feed itself - and which percentage keeps shifting, that's more about drought, war and other temporary emergencies than a permanent condition.
Required reading is this very sharp, short column by historian / columnist Gwynne Dyer:
http://www.gwynnedyer.net/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%
We are constantly bombarded with the comparison between our own wealthy fifth of the world and the poorest fifth, most of them in Africa. In the above column, he reminds us that most of Africa had a fairly good standard of living as recently as the 60s and has declined in recent decades because of apalling governments, not "natural" problems like more people than the land can feed.
And the "middle three-fifths" of humanity are a success story, recently - China and India get the press for their economic rise because they are so large, but all over the world (Dyer writes the above from Turkey) people of this generation have risen from subsistence to a level of comfort that most of our grandparents would recognise - or even envy. (See the series "1900 house" to realize how far we've come since our grandparents day.) That middle 3/5ths don't need the laptop for light, they have food, clothing, shelter, some light and water at least at the end of the street. What they need are opportunities to earn more cash so they can get water to the house and sewer that isn't the gutter.
Three-fifths of six billion is quite a "market". And the sooner they migrate up from $10/day to $50, the sooner we'll have *help* with the tough problem of the poorest fifth. Reviewing the recent economic changes, there's no reason to imagine this can't happen in a generation.
How can MSN tell them what they can do and what not, since the third world governments will spend THEIR money on the project. May be cause they would have less to spend on defense equipment, high-tech medicines on US prices, or MS software.
Negativeness is your strongest point?
World Summits on Free Information Structure: http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/
Not only is LiquidCoooled totally correct, but furthermore, additional mindshare amongst the public is not being sopped up either! Negroponte's project adds additional attention on the starving 3rd world, an entirely new, positive batch of attention and people being mindful of these nations' plight. While it may be altruistically impractical at this point in time, a supercheap laptop very similar to what MIT designed will ultimately be planted in these kind of nations. Merely a matter of when. And by these risk-takers bravely embarking on such a radical initiative, they help draw the time when this phenom can occur, increasingly closer to now.
Negative nellies that have condemned this initiative are merely myopic knuckleheads lacking in both vision and practical intelligence.
Take a look at Kenya. It costs US$129.50 PER MONTH for a 128kbps ADSL connection. http://www.telkom.co.ke/AdslTarriffs.htm. This is by no means unusual for an African country.
As has been pointed out elsewhere on this page, $100 is a large amount of money for a poverty stricken third world inhabitant. Yet why should someone hand over that kind of money when access to the internet is so ridiculously over-priced that it renders the machine unconnectable?
It seems like Mr. Dvorak is the one that needed access to a laptop when he was a child. If he was educated about other cultures more as a child he wouldnt' think that every "third world" country is inhabited by uncivilized people eking out a meager existence.
As another Brazilian, I have mixed feelings with the deployment of OLPC laptops here. But one thing is for sure: the *research* done by OLPC is something very benefitial for everyone. Just like when men went to the moon: maybe we didn't really need to land on the big piece of cheese ;-), but it allowed the research of several, useful technologies.
Some of it happens at OLPC: see the "never-sleeping" WiFi chips, designed for mesh networks, as an example, or the dual-resolution LCD. Even if the $100 laptop never arrives, those technologies will hit the market somehow.
Just a confirmation that Microsoft is fighting this project, ;-)
In Switzerland, MS paid a journalist from the Hebdo to get a interview of the head of Microsoft Europe,
the title of the interview was: "why the 100$ laptop will fail !"
and MS chief said the that the use of unsecure software with no auto-update will be one of the reason the project will fail
(it was in a serious news paper http://www.hebdo.ch/)
Oh my god
Average rating: 3.55 from 2390 users
I tried to rate it myself but you have to give it atleast one star
AIDS is a great example of an educational problem.
And if the laptop is truly as robust as advertised it could come pre-loaded with $100.00 worth of text books. Its primary use is as an education tool, and even without the mesh-network it can be that.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I've done quite a bit of work in Northern Uganda on computing in humanitarian relief. I've developed a term for projects that look good to people with no field experience, but are inadequately tested (usually in the west, because it's cheaper than testing in the field) and doomed to failure from the start - "Developed In Geneva, field-tested In New York". I've never seen such a project succeed, and the OLPC project falls into that category.
Even if they solve the technical problems relating to price vs. surviving the hostile environment (laptops don't last long outside of offices anyway, and kids are going to drop it, spill sticky liquids on the keyboard, throw it at somebody they don't like, try to break it so they 'can't' do homework) the social problems are considerably harder to solve, harder to predict, and will vary more with geographical location. I can't think of all of the problems (that's what testing is for!) but here's a few examples.
What do you do when a child loses a laptop?
Do you get them a new laptop? People will develop a survival strategy of 'losing' the laptops, and selling them. Even if you can only salvage $5 from each one, that's a lot of money to the majority of people on the planet, and if they're effectively free large numbers of people will 'lose' their child's laptop. So you either need an endless supply of laptops, or you're eventually going to have to say "no".
What happens to the kid you say "no" to if all their textbooks are on it?
Between 1% and 10% of parents will be hostile to the scheme (some will think it's an attack on 'real' education, some will think it's an attack on their cultural beliefs, and some will just be the nutcases you get everywhere). What do the children of these parents do?
The first thing that needs to change in developing countries is mentality, that is the most fundamental problem, even though lack of food, housing, jobs etc. are also important. That sounds crazy, but I think anyone who's lived in a developing country would agree - most of the lack of food, housing, jobs etc. comes from the fact that people are stuck thinking in a counterproductive way and lack access to the information to stimulate them to think differently. That should be a central goal of development, and for addressing that most important issue I commend those who want to give the world 100 dollar laptops.
However, by itself it probably won't have the effect it should, for a variety of reasons. I hope, however, that we don't get back to the "let's give them food and tractors and other crap for free" attitude, that is ABSOLUTELY the most destructive method of using aid money. It's like trying to stop a sand bag from leaking by adding more sand to it. I would take that 100 dollars and use it for exchange programs so that people in the developing world can expand their knowledge of how things can work, either in other developing nations or in first world nations.
This is the quote:
Let's face it: These high-tech gems are a laughable addition to a mud hut.
This is the author:
This article was reported and written by John C. Dvorak for MarketWatch.
By the time I had gotten to the end of the article, it was no surprise to find John C. Dvorak was the author. The man made some useful contributions to connectivity technology in the late '80s and early '90s. In the last ten years or so, he has been demonstrating that he can make a good money by being a highly visible troll. I cannot imagine that he actually believes half the stuff he writes; mostly he just seems to like to keep the pot boiling.
His argument against OLPC is basically a recycling of the old "White Man's Burden" argument, which was used to justify european colonialism in the late 1800s and neo-colonialism in the middle 1900s. In its current form it strongly implies that individuals who grew up in third world cultures are incapable of managing new technologies or making decisions about implementing these technologies in their native lands. It is up to us, who were fortunate enough to be born into the high tech cultures, to develop a Gantt chart for bringing these poor peoples up to speed (and we can do so without regard to cultural or logistic issues we know nothing about). And we should raise our voices in protest against anyone who suggests that there might be another way of doing things.
I also have some serious concerns about the "facts" presented in this product of Dvorak's imagination. He keeps referring to Africa for his examples. Since when are Brazil, Argentina, or Thailand in Africa? Yet these are the three nations that have expressed the most serious interest in deploying OLPCs.
I suggest that when you see Dvorak's name in the byline, you should use all your critical reading skills when absorbing his words. And since the man has a sizeable ego, this is even more important when he buries his name at the end, as he did in this article.
I totally agree that this is a slightly off-the-wall project, and I'm not entirely sure that it's what developing countries need most. But viewed as a replacement for textbooks, if these things serve their educational purpose well, then I think it's at least a worthwhile experiment. Sometimes, especially when the standard methods don't seem to be helping a group of people, it's worth going out on a limb to see what happens. There are plenty of people donating $100 here and there to feed villages, and this is a safe bet. You know what your $100 (minus whatever cuts are taken out along the way) is going to ultimately be worth to those that receive it; with a $100 laptop, it's a much more volatile investment. It's very likely that a few people will benefit greatly from them and emerge as the educated, and most will either sell them off, have them stolen, or not get anything useful out of it. Is that worth $100? [Actually, the figure may be closer to $1000 for every person that actually makes good use of the thing.] Keep in mind that here in America, the price of one education is ~$120,000 at the college level. Have you ever in your life heard a person argue that we should not send our kids to college because using that money we could have fed 1,200 African villages for a year? Education is a very valuable thing, and sometimes the lowest levels of education are both the easiest to achieve and the most valuable.
In any case, I don't know if it's "worth" it, whatever that means. But neither does G. Pascal Zachary, and at least I'm happy that someone's trying something new. We know quite well that you can't alleviate hunger in the long term by donating food; can you get rid of the uneducated, thus creating more people able to solve the day-to-day problems, just by sending computers? Seems worth a shot...
One of the points of this article, is that because of the OLPC project we have "lost mind share" by "wasting" our time on "naive feel-good showboating".
What about the "lost mindshare" I now have as a result of "wasting" my time reading this FUD ??!!
Besides, did you seriously expect a Stanford professor to say that a project led by a former MIT person is a good idea?
Oh, you're right: The Free Market of Milton Friedman has done wonders to help poor people. We have some of the most free market in the World here in the US, and the number of people below the poverty level continues to rise.
No, Friedman has done more harm than good. And if you guys think that because you've taken an Econ 101 course (and took an incomplete, at that), you can suddenly explain Milton Friedman to others, you need to bone up on bullshit.
Trickle down this.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not that there are not many groups already sending food and drugs (and doctors and farming advisors and and and...) but perhaps OLPC should broaden it's "customer base" a little. Allow non-governmental agencies to buy these machines for $100 each and then re-sell them to the 1st world for $200 and convert the diference into food or shelter or medicine or vitamin eyedrops or whatever.
I don't have the $200, but if I did I'd buy a machine (probably from the group sending food).
"3rd world Soviet Bloc countries"
Good luck finding some.
It might teach people how to make cleaner water. Or, put in a Sony battery, and it could boil water or cook a meal!
... and then they built the supercollider.
The thing is, we're not talking about things on the physical level, we're talking economics- and in economics, value can be created. If Bob puts together a set of shelves, it's probably more useful and valuable to him than the lumber that it came from. If he bakes a loaf of bread, it's more valuable than the grain that it came from. If Van Gogh paints a painting, it's a lot more valuable to humanity than the canvas and paints (and ultimately the pigments and mediums that those came from) ever were. Heck, look at computers! The same electrons can send an amazing, awe-inspiring, insightful comment to Slashdot, or they can send a -1 Flamebait.
You also point out the Sun. I suppose the Sun is a big part of this process too - due to agriculture and horticulture and such.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Ultimately libertarianism fails the most basic of sniff tests: If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.
It was a hypothetical. I probably didn't make that clear enough :)
Kill me, but doesn't MS own MSN?
In that case, could MS be planting articles intentionally to divert attention away from the $100 lappy, which will run a Linux based OS?
o hai
I can see both sides of this argument. The $100 laptop giveaway does suggest some naivitee in my opinion, but is forward thinking enough that you have to allow for this.
At anyrate, I hope that those who make statements on either side put their money where their mouth is. Give a little, and invest in what you believe in.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
It's not racist per se. But it is extremely condescending and arrogant. It most likely is rooted in some form of xenophobia or ignorance.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, "Well, if those goddamned Africans would just get off their lazy butts and make some food, there wouldn't even be a problem!"
You obviously haven't heard many neoconservatives or Economic ultra-Libertarians talk about their world-view.
It sounds to me like you're some hyper-PC, ultrasensative bozo who leaps at any opportunity to shout "Racism!" from the highest peak.
Actually, you sound rather ultrasensitive about this. Just because someone questions a choice of words, they are a "PC bozo"? As I said before, I don't think the intent was directly racist, but there's nothing wrong with speculating about why he chose to use that phrase. It is patronizing, at the very least.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I should also add that the grandparent post only notes "an undercurrent" of racism, and goes on to elaborate about the condescending attitude. Hardly the "shouting racism from the highest peak" that you claim.
... and then they built the supercollider.
This is a terrible argument, like with the mesh networking - it just means that someone will finally write a robust zeroconf scanner daemon. And just in time if you ask me, my /normal/ laptop intermittently switches eth1 with eth2 on reboot. :(
It's always a good laugh to see people point at a the drops of water and say "Thats why the bucket is empty".
The fact is that it's cheaper to send a collection of laptops as software than it is to send it as a pile of books. The argument ONLY makes sense if the people have no education system to begin with. If they have schools then this is an improvement, a chance to work more efficiently and with less cost. Each textbook a student uses costs 100 dollars or more. By getting them laptops they get the whole collection of textbooks for that price (if the local government takes time to publish them digitally).
A similar example is when people call for cuts at NASA. WE need to balance the economy, sure, and we need to cut government spending. These numbers are in the billions and trillions. It's funny to see people point at projects like the supercollider and the space station and say oh lets cut that while blindly wasting money on massive defense projects. how many state of the art aircraft carriers do we need to fight an Iraqi insurgency anyway?
The real point of this article is to dilute the idea that the computing power you had 10 years ago was enough. You could accomplish the same tasks (word processing, web browsing, 3d acceleration) on a postage stamp sized computer today if the software was still available.
See, what Intel, MS, AMD, and lots of other companies are afraid of is that Computing can become as cheap as calculating did. There was a time when calculators were expensive. Now you can but a good scientific one for ten bucks. If Negroponte succeeds with his OLPC project a lot of people are going to start asking "where's mine?" And the fact is thaty laptops are rapidly approaching that price point. Watch the low end prices. Thee are laptops available that cost less than a game console.
John Dvorak is nothing but a shill for Billie Microslop. Ole' Billie himself has been severely chastised previously for his smarmy self-serving diss'ing of the OLPC project. The anti-OLPC rhetoric is ALL about the fact that the laptop has been created without using windows bullplop. Get over yourself you condescending Dorkus, the OLPC and the countries that are looking to buy into the project are already WELL-aquainted with ALL of the downsides to opening the door to Microslop's bleed-em-till-they-drop business practices.
Neocons and ultra-Libertarians that I've heard speak of their views are generally not racist. This is, they just don't like anything they view as a 'hand-out', whether that be food for starving Africans, or welfare, or sports scholarships, or any number of things. I'm not saying this view is 'right', I'm saying it's not 'racist'.
And you're right, maybe I am being pretty sensative. But I've seen too many people throw around the term 'racism' just becaue they don't get their own way, or someone displeases them, or [minority group] thinks it hasn't got its fair share. The KKK are racist. The Nazis were racist. The Confederated South was racist. Many nations, governments, organizations, and people today are racist. But one author using two words to describe a group of people without even any racist context is not. I just don't see it.
From TFA:
Yeah, the article is FUD. Yeah, it's wrong on most of its points. But racist? It's advocating giving food and electricity to starving black people (albeit with ulterior motives, no doubt. It is Dvorak, after all.), for chrissakes.
"The real problem is lost mind share."
does anyone believe this crap? sure, i have a lot of available mind share just floating around. when i have spare time i mess with linux or something else to do with my computer (read: gaming). take my computer away and i'm not trying to figure out how to drop a case of pickled sausages onto a village in africa without breaking the pickling jars or crushing someone. no, at that point i'm trying to figure out how i get my computer back. so no mind share is lost, instead the spare geek cycles are, instead, harvested.
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
Umm, the idea of Milton Friedman and other economic liberals is that the world is NOT a zero sum game, which is why the fact that we are wealthy is taking exactly nothing away from people in the third world (who were poor when we were poor, and would still be poor if we became poor again).
Yes but 1 plus one equals two, not more!
There is a limited amount of wealth in the world and the richer one nation/group is, the poorer someone else has to be. There is only so much to go around.
By the way: if you believe what I just said, you're a moron.
Latewire
Welfare/Self-fare in summary ... at the time of your death will you (MSN/MS/.../G. Pascal) feel you need to do much more for humanity, or will you (RHS/Linus/.../Nick, [WoeFolk Knights]) know that you made a difference for humanity.
... (all important and necessities) are parts of a stopgap till the next calamity. Mr. G. Pascal Zachary and other limited welfare approach did-gooders live to be called (and are) humanitarians (Knights of the WoeFolk Continent) maintain failing cultures and help solve the next human disaster.
... terms that should be used for the OLPC project are Education, Learning, Communicating, Participation, Sharing, Collaborating, Developing, Community ....
...). As was proved in the USA (60s,70s ...) welfare is much needed in many communities, but welfare must have a "Self-fare" plan for self-sufficiency with agriculture, education, economic development ... many options/things.
...) effort may have implementation problems, and possibly even some questionable benefits for humanity. However, I do know that the OLPC foundation needs to be looking at and planning for the next OLPC-II project for a self-sufficient humanity.
... PLEASE, quite being such pontificating jackasses, because good for humanity is good (not money or glory).
Welfare as in food,water, shelter,
The OLPC folks/foundation are humanitarians looking to provide part of a longterm solution to poverty
Both humanitarian approaches are gravely needed in less developed communities (even in the USA and EU). One to address emergency response (failed in NOLA USA) and the other to address self-sufficiency (failed in NOLA USA, Native People, Slums,
This first OLPC project like any other humanitarian (Habitat for Humanity
IOW, I say to all the simple-minded, parochial, and dogmatic nay-sayers
Again, I say THANKS to all the folks at the OLPC foundation and admire them as "Knights of the WoeFolk Continent".
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Yeah, you need to change people, but those people need to be alive before they can be reformed. That is to say, in general, the education that you want to push on those in poverty really only matters and can only take effect when those in poverty have at least a modicum of stability and wealth - enough for food, basic medical care, and water at the very least. Laptops are entirely useless without that base. It's an infrastructure that underlies that of internet connectivity.
I feel the same way about vi and html vs. wordmagic or whatever.
In a very condescending way. Combined with a bunch of other stereotypes and misrepresentations. The whole idea that there are no poor people who could make use of a laptop is extremely ignorant. He assumes that anybody receiving these will not have electricity, and lives in some sort of primitive mud hut.
Again, what would you have preferred they say instead? What term would not be arrogant and condescending to you?
Well, I'd prefer that he actually think about the composition of the world's poor population, and who is likely to be getting these laptops, and not just assume that they are ignorant hut-dwellers. that's why "these people" is condescending. He thinks "poor people" and immediately has a bunch of stereotypical xenophobic images fill his head. He uses "these people" to refer to this internal image, because he has not fully thought it through, and is scared to explicitly refer to his assumptions.
I mean, you might have a case if this was someone actually speaking instead of writing; you can pick those sorts of implications from body language and tone. But this is a writer who used two innocuous words to reference a group of people. I'm just not seeing the arrogance.
Not true. You can infer plenty from wiritng. Dvorak is supposed to be a professional writer. he shouldn't be so careless. He's also referring to a group of people that only exists inside his head - which is, again, why some people feel it has racist undercurrents. Personally, I would say it is borne out of ignorance and xenophobia, not explicit racism. But racism and xenophobia often go hand-in-hand with racism, so it's easy to see how people get that impression.
Neocons and ultra-Libertarians that I've heard speak of their views are generally not racist. This is, they just don't like anything they view as a 'hand-out', whether that be food for starving Africans, or welfare, or sports scholarships, or any number of things. I'm not saying this view is 'right', I'm saying it's not 'racist'.
I never said it was racist. In my comment, I was referring to the "lazy" part. Many people of that political persuasion seem to think that anybody who is not wealthy is lazy or stupid. It doesn't matter whether they are black, white or purple - they have a general disdain for poverty and people who try to fix it, without making a profit from it.
But one author using two words to describe a group of people without even any racist context is not. I just don't see it.
I have to disagree that it lacks xenophobic context. Viewed in the context of the article, and the position of privilege it is written from, the "undercurrent" stands out pretty blatantly to my eyes.
Again, you are arguing with the wrong person about racism. I have said several times that I don't think he is being racist - just xenophobic and ignorant. And I can see how someone might see that as racism, even if I don't. I just don't think it's a big deal that someone might speculate about perceived racist undertones, because of the condescending tone.
It's advocating giving food and electricity to starving black people
Yeah, well that's an interesting way to put it. You pretty much unveil the whole racial undercurrent right there. This laptop programme is not just for black people. But that's probably the exact image that Dvorak has in his mind. Instead of realizing that this is for Brazilians, Amercians, Asians and lots of other people besides starving Africans. You really hit the nail on the head there. Nowhere does the OLPC mission statement say it is for black people.
Also, there are plenty of racist people who adocate feeding starving black people with good intentions. It's not a defense against charges of racism. For example, many missionaries really wanted to help indigenous people in various countries, and even devoted their lives to it, but they did so in thoroughly racist ways.
... and then they built the supercollider.
There are two problems here. One short term:
Provide safe drinking water and food
One longer term:
Train people in sanitation, promote education, teach job skills, etc.
Who says that the conflict between these two is a "zero sum game"?
I give to 3 charities every month, 2 of which help people in the third world. Who is to say how I allocate the money that I can spare each month? (Answer: me!)
If some people and organizations want to contribute to longer term solutions, good for them!
If this program really gets started, I was hoping to buy one for $300 in order to have a novelty for myself, and to provide 2 for kids in the third world.
A little off subject, but I was writing yesterday (http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/) about what is commonly referred to as the new world order. I expect individuals and corporations (who act out of profit motive) will probably do the most for helping out people in the third world who need help.
Folks are thinking that so far, efforts to simply pay for food fail. Often the money (or supplies) are simply grabbed by the government/military/rebels/whathaveyou before they can get to the villiages that need them. World hunger and poverty won't be cured through direct donation (though donation can help alleviate the symptoms for a while).
What the $100 laptop program aims to do is provide these countries an opportunity to more easily educate their children so, as those generations grow up, they can be employed in better paying jobs or even develop new companies within their country. By helping these people build their education & employment situations from the ground up, they can eventually bring their entire nation out of third-world status.
This certainly isn't a silver bullet. There's bound to be incidents of theft and vandalism of the laptops by those opposed to letting the average citizen work up out of poverty, and those just looking for a quick buck. But, it's at least an opportunity for these nations to start rebuilding their economies.
An opinion piece should never be labeled an "article". Especially when the piece is by John Dvorak, who's the absolutely the most ignorant computer pundit in the business. Which says a lot, given how sloppy computer pundits are with the facts.
Just a side note... "Anonymous Coward" or Lazy Prick? :P I'm just lazy to read all replies and see if any comments were directed to side of the discussion yet. and even more lazy to create an account for 1 time post only. Anyway, to not be really anonymous, I'm caue [dot] rego [at] google [dot] com.
I've seem a lot of arguments, more like counter arguments, that are all right, but I'd say misguided. The point isn't social. It's not a subsidy from developed countries. Or at least it shouldn't be. It's about making a really cheap computer to a market which would be interested in buying it and can't afford more expensive ones. That's all.
The discussion should be commercial. It should be about if that market does exist and if the producing cost would be paid up. Just because it's something for a cheaper market, doesn't mean it's related to poverty or hungry countries / people. It doesn't even mean it's a smaller market.
I believe the idea of that computer being a notebook, would be to reduce costs. Comparing same technology levels desktop and laptop computers, we can see that laptops are more expensive. But in the lower branch, it may be the other way around.
Anyway, if there's anything social to discuss about this, it would be just to measure who would be interested in buying such a computer. What use that person could ever do of such a tool. It might be consumerist, curiosity, entertainment. It might be small business. Maybe schools who want to have some technology. The only thing I'm sure is that it doesn't need to be a notebook unless it is cheaper.
MSN money central doing a negative story on the 100 dollar laptop, why am I not surprised? Bill Gates himself denounced the laptop, dont be surprised that one of his websites is not doing a 'report' on it.
I vote that no one who doesn't contribute in some significant way (time - money - resources) to the causes they claim are being hurt by the OLPC effort not be allowed to comment about those causes being hurt. Sheesh.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Second of all, this is going to be a logistical nightmare. Estimates already put it at a net cost of $1000 per laptop, after all maintenance and set up. That's for some glorified books, that could otherwise be printed for pennies a piece. (Obviously, retail books cost more, albeit much less than laptops, but there are many projects (e.g. Wikimedia's) to make public domain books that are far more feasible and less expensive than OLPC, and it certainly isn't ridiculous to suggest a publisher might donate books.)
Thirdly, they aren't going to be used. Is it honestly reasonable to suggest that someone is going to be handed a laptop, never having used a computer before, and start it up and start learning to read, write, and learn science, history, and geography? Then magically go on to learn vocational skill from it?
Fourth, is internet access. It is the one thing that could give it an advantage over books, although not enough to make up for it's disadvantages and cost. But it will have huge problems. If people are relying on the mesh networking for access, they won't get it. Joe next door lost his laptop. Bob's is broken, and the service staff don't have the time or resources to fix it within the month. Bill sold his. The other neighbors don't have children. This will certainly happen to a lot of people.
They need to work for real education. Spend this ridiculous amount of money building schools and training teachers.
"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. Give him a laptop, and he will have a doorstop."
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Means, modes, medians.
If the 'average' income is high because of a kleptocrat and his favorite clan getting much mineral wealth, while the rest of the population is high and dry, then 'average' income is pointless.
Look at Brazil's gap -- there are boutiques with helipads for the ultra-wealthy... so that they can avoid exposure to the impoverished, high pop-density, high-crime areas.
How is this going to educate people? How is a $1000/person (after maintenance, a reasonable estimate) laptop going to be better for education than a $1/person book, and using the rest of the money to build schools and train teachers?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
they should send U-hauls
a u-haul truck would do them more good than a laptop
get the hell out of there, nothing will grow, aids is everywhere.
load the hut in the truck and get going
If nothing else you can trap thousands of flies with a couple of two liter bottles.
I think you're being a little harsh. The people running this program know technology and computers. They are using what they know to do something. It's a lot better then most, who do nothing.
It wouldn't make sense for these same people to get into the food distribution business, or whatever else. They know THIS business, not that one.
It WILL provide a tool for education, whether you believe it's "good enough" or not. It's up to these people to make use of it. If they don't, or if they miss this opportunity, there's not much we can do about it. Hopefully the people in these communities will try to make the best of it, and get something out of this program.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Computer ownership doesn't automatically transform uneducated people into collegiates. Especially without network connectivity. This guy has a good point, albeit cynically written.
I don't get why people keep complaining that this is a waste of money and they would rather use their money to help those people get food and other types of support. Well there are already programs for that.
The conclusion I've come to is that the people making these arguments fall into two categories:
1) Sour Grapes. This article falls into this category, I think. We all know what the M in MSN stands for, and what OS the OLPC isn't running. Some people badmouth stuff because they wish they could be a part of it, but aren't, or can't have the exact position they'd like to have (I doubt the OLPC folks would refuse a monetary donation from MS/BG, they just chose an open source OS because that fit better with the goals of the project).
2) Codependents. People who have a great need to feel like they're helping others. This in itself is great, but the "need" part of it makes them sometimes behave in ways that aren't necessarily for the long-term good. I think the guy quoted in the article ("with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop?") is a member of this group. My response is; great, what have they gained from that? Another year of living in the same shitty situation? For what purpose? So you can give them another $100 worth of food next year? I think giving someone a resource that can help them improve their situation themselves is a lot more valuable than a years worth of food. But then, if their situation were actually improved, they wouldn't need this guy to give them food, and then how would he feel good about himself?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If you don't spend some time collecting data, interviewing and generally spending time walking in the shoes of your supposed customers, guess what you end up delivering? Something that *you* may think is cool, but probably not what the customers need. Sounds like the leaders of this project don't know the first thing about Product Management. Pity, really.
Lets have a march/rally/riot^H^H^H^Hpeaceful gathering to inform the world that buying Vista is stealing food from starving children! Look at all the good that could have been done with the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) that Microsoft has already spent on advertising! And the hundreds of thousands Microsoft has already spent on development! And the dozens of dollars they have doubtless spent on debugging... no, I'm sorry, I'm sure that isn't accurate, I'm sure they've spent much more than $48 debugging.
Chanting:Buying Vista kills starving children!
Use Linux and save a village!
Buying Vista kills starving children!
Use Linux and save a village!
Edit note: No I don't know how much MS is really spending... I'm afraid I'm not good enough with math to understand numbers that big. For me anything larger than a million is hard to envision. Feel free to post the real numbers, I know I didn't. If it makes you feel better just substite the words "insanely huge","still insanely big" and "unreasonably large" where I used numbers pulled out of...., that is to say badly guessed.B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Individual laptops are created for people that are mobile, need independence and ultimate privacy. Villages are not at that point in society. Having shared computers (a few for a village) will promote more sharing, community and cooperation--which helps health and social issues. It does take a village as someone mentioned....
... not to mention the massive potential for child exploitation. If kids in these countries actually manage to connect to the Internet, just think how easy it would be to solicit them. The parents will have no idea how to use a laptop. The kids will be in chat rooms.... Imagine that some sketchy guy says to a kid in Africa, "Hey! I'm your new friend. I'll buy you a plane ticket to America and pay for your college education if you come live with me...." and of course nobody ever hears from the kid again.
And of course, there's porn. There's all kinds of stuff out there that parents probably wouldn't want their kids to be looking at, but there doesn't seem to be much attention focused on educating parents or including parental control/monitoring capabilities. Everything I've heard about this project seems to focus on the educational possibilities, but the reality is that the Internet is a dangerous place, too. The people in charge of OLPC don't seem to want to address those risks. If they actually go through with this as planned, a lot of little kids will get hurt.
People were educated up to mid-nineties mostly without the use of computers, remember? And still we had buildings with working architecture, working logistics, communications, railways, paved roads, etc.
The standard of living has not changed that much since then. Computers are a smaller part of our living standards than you realize.
It takes a couple of hours to teach a good mathematician FORTRAN or lisp. For a person who knows how to draw machine schematics on paper, it takes about a month to learn CAD. For an illustrator, it takes maybe a week to learn most of using drawing applications.
Here's why we should all stop and think about how we intend technology to be put to use. This is a quote from the project's home page:
"Recent work with schools in Maine has shown the huge value of using a laptop across all of one's studies, as well as for play. Bringing the laptop home engages the family. In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home."
There's so many flaws in their reasoning I'll just let that speak for itself. Maybe they should just go back to developing computers for schools in Maine.
http://www.laptop.org/faq.en_US.html
Is it really providing a tool for education when it costs 1000x as much as an equivalent tools, which many more associated problems? If you spend millions on laptops, how much less do you have for schools?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
A while ago I proofread a few pages of an old zoology book for the Gutenberg proofreading network (URL:www.pgdp.net). Copyright as it is prevents recent material from becoming available unless the authors expressly permit it, but I assure you for some topics a free more-than-100-year-old book is really not to be sneezed at. And compressed, the text will take at most a few hundred kbytes.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I have a cousin who was recently in Africa helping small businesses set up internal IT infrastructure. He did, of course, have to work developers and engineers for some of the projects. If those developers and engineers had been occupied with an expensive project that barely helps the people on the receiving end then those small businesses would fail.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
How timely! I was just looking at the Sabre Foundation website since I had some books to donate. Their motto is Humanitarian Aid for the Mind. I've lived in an Africa village 3 years and in a small town in India 4 years, and while hunger existed in both places it wasn't the only need. Many people were hungry for good reading material and intellectual stimulation as well. Once when I wasn't taking notes at a meeting, I was chastised by an illiterate farmer. He said, "You can read and write but don't use it. What good is that? If I were able to read and write I would use it all the time." In fact after 3 years in Chad my dream project was to set up a literacy program and bookmobile. There were so many ways that even a bit of education could be leveraged to improve village life. I believe that the OLPC project is in this spirit. The FAs premise seems to be that anyone outside a developed country has physical needs which far outweigh their intellectual needs. That is blatently false and just a little bit patronizing.
wrong, the illusion of weath is not always created by taking something from someone... it is also created by leverage....
for instance, if we REALLY wanted to look at the US and its relative weath, I think we would be surprised... The US is actually a impoverished country running at a > 1 trillion deficet
if you looked at the average net worth of americans, i think we would find that a great percentage of Americans have net worths greater than 0, i.e. student loans, cars, houses, credit card debt... many americans do not own their cars and houses despite their relative high incomes, they are held on 5 year notes and 30 year mortgages
americans just have a lot of crap, but we do not necessarily own it...
the government wants us to have a lot of crap, so it continually runs a deficet and sells a lot of bonds to china, pretty soon china is going to own our butts as they continue to devalue their currency
As mr.Putin said "fat cats" already gifting finances, food and machineries to Third World for many years without any success. May be you doesn't - 80% off all this helps usually was stolen in Western countries on initial stage by paying Big Monies to NY consultant companies and lawyers. 15 % will be stollen in Third world and will be sold on grey market. Next, on 4% laptops, Wikipedia will be replaced by Korahn. And only 1% will reach kids. May be one new Einstein will survive...
They tried to ship tractors once to African, so that people would be able to grow their own food instead of depending on subsidies. The OLD give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach him how to fish, he eats for a lifetime BOGUS paradigm.
What happened was, the people didn't know what to do with the tractors after being told how to use them, so they stripped them for shiny metal objects to wear around their necks as ornaments, etc.
The worst problem of all is, that while some of the internet (like wikipedia) is a fountain of information to help you solve problems and absorb knowledge, MOST time spent on computers is done just maintaining them, or keeping them running. Far from what people believe, they don't make you more productive, they are like CRACK cocaine, you get addicted to them, and all the rest of your life goes to hell.
If these people are on the edge of survival, giving them an electronic device is the last thing you need to do. You need to do something to keep them firmly in reality, not escaping into some virtual reality world while the rain comes in throught their roof, their cattle die in the field, their children starve, adn there they are addicted to the new shiny computer like so many american housewives are, in chat, or learning linux, or surfing the web, or playing yahoo games, or trying to mess around with email scams or options trading or so many lost propositions.
I hate Microsoft and its FUD game of trying to undermine the 100 laptop, but really, in reality, all computers have no business in this environment. Likewise, they don't belong in schools either. I can't think of anything more counterproductive to learning that putting computers in schools.
I mean, look at me, for the last 5 hours I have been trying to get some Revver portal code to run, which required Smarty, which wasn't installed, so I spent 4 hours creating directories and setting permissions and posting to forums for help, and then figure out myself that PHP isn't working, so I try to update it with YUM, only to find out I need to rebuild my rpm database, so I have to figure out how to do that, and then I run "yum install php5" which seems to be in an infinite loop, and I am no closer to having my silly video portal working than I was before, and I'm in an infinate death spiral downward. One thing requires another, which requires another, which is broken, or incompatible, or obtuse as hell to configure. Computers are so damn literal, you have to have a thousand million bits exactly right (unless its data), or the thing just won't work right. And there is only one right, and that is perfect.
Tell me again, what have I accomplished in the last 5 hours with computers, but just make myself more depressed and frustrated.
Over 30 years I haven't made a damn dime with comptuers, and I'm to the point of disassembling them all for bling, and going down to the local projects and hock it all off on the street corner. Maybe I can get some dime bags for this shiny but pointless Nvidia 7800GT chip, to go on the front as a hood ornament to some brother's cadilac...
Is there any proof of a direct correlation? Does money spent on these units mean money not spent on schools? Or, could the budget already be earmarked for "technology improvements" and this is better spending then say, $800 Dells in only 50 schools versus $120 OLPC in 330 schools?
The situation is probably more complex then either of us are fully aware of. We don't know what the governments of these countries do with the money. There's obviously a need for basic necessities, but sometimes you have to also look to the future, and I am of the belief that introducing kids to computers is a good way to get them competitive in the new world.
Plus, as someone else pointed out, these notebooks won't all go to people that are starving. It would be a little ridiculous to hand these things to diseased and dying children - but there's a lot of communities where the people DO work, they DO have basic education programs, but they are very poor and would never be able to touch a computer else wise.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
A textbook of good quality written at an excellent standard, appropriate for the curriculum of the students, costs a significant percentage of $100. For example my Anatomy and Physiology text book cost me AU$130, my Chemistry textbook cost $80, and I still needed two others for this year at university.
High school textbooks are cheaper, but more are required.
By using the OLPC for a direct substitute for textbooks, (open source textbooks, change the world!) then they pay for themselves in the first two years. Over four years of school, they pay for themselves about twice.
This does not take into consideration all the additional things that can be done with a laptop that can not be done with a textbook.
So assuming the market is children who already go to school, then this project is set to have some truly revolutionary effects on the way learning is done and the cost/benefit of that schooling.
How is that a failure? It isn't. This is FUD.
In the maelstrom of the chaos at the center of my mind, I taste the salt of sadness as I feel my soul unwind.
either he's stupid or trolling for clicks or both. Standard formula 1. Pick some topic geeks care about 2. Exaggerate claims to the contrary of popular belief 3. watch clicks/views roll in. 4. get paycheck 5. goto 1
~live life like you mean it~
I have to say it and agree with whoever else has pointed this out: Give a village $100 and they'll eat for a year. Give them a $100 laptop and children will have a chance to further their education and eat for a lifetime. *Doh!!*
;-)
Thanks: redundant or not, I had to get that off pasty-white, bony, geek-boy chest
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
That the world will find out that you can do just as much on a $100 computer with free software as you can on a $1,000 laptop with $2,000 of software installed on it.
So the Astroturfers are out in full force on this forum to try to "realign the perceptions of reality."
Sad, I just wish they would go get real jobs.
Remember, these attacks are coming from the same people who claim to own Linux and have already had their proxy SCO try to create FUD for years now.
Microsoft and Intel and the money men behind them were licking their chops hoping to create huge markets in the developing third world and then along comes the $100 laptop program that used free software and will sell a billion machines at cost before they are done.
Can't have that!
They must be stopped!
Dictate a news report at once and run it on a news network that is controlled by Microsoft! Cause nobody else would run such a bogus news story first.
If this is what they are doing in public, you just have to wonder at how many things these pathetic assholes are doing behind the curtains to try to stop this charity program.
Computer companies attacking this program is the same thing as private blood banks attacking the Red Cross for giving away blood for free to sick people in third world countries.
We all do what we can do.
I am not a doctor. I cannot provide for the sick.
I am not a farmer. I cannot grow food for the starving.
I don't have capital. I cannot provide jobs in the 3rd world.
I do know computers and programming. Providing computers and free software to regions and then connecting up those regions to the global internet is what I can do.
So that is what I will do.
My little part.
Anything that joins us all together closer is a good thing.
You are, of course, correct when you say that knowledge == power.
But since when does knowledge == laptops? If it's just about spreading knowledge, write some useful textbooks, and create a small library in every village in need. Each copy of the book will cost a lot less than $100. Books also don't require electricity, don't break as easily as long as they're handled with care but are more easily replacable if they do, and they don't require any special training (beyond the ability to read) to use. Books are also a lot easier to keep and spread secretly in areas where knowledge of certain topics is persecuted.
Another great tool for information and learning that is often underestimated is radio. It's cheap to produce, hard to censor, and still reasonably easily available. And if you want to enable people in 3d world countries to access the internet, internet cafés or internet stations of some sort seem like a much cheaper, more reliable, less risky way to achieve that.
Laptops do have their uses, but they're certainly not a required tool for learning, or even the best one. The only advantage they have to books is that they can display interactive content, but that doesn't seem like a vital advantage to me.
Basilisk Digital
It is important to know that MoneyCentral is published by Microsoft, and Microsoft was against the "$100 computer project" from the beginning.
They tried to interfere with the project a few times. I don't know why, however. Because it is Linux-powered? That would be childish.
This article is yet another piece of FUD from Microsoft and nothing more. (Note that the article came from MSN, created and controlled by Microsoft, was written by John C. Dvorak, and that the $100 laptop runs Linux). The article isn't honest criticism but an attempt to make the OLPC project seem evil by suggesting that it's stealing food from people in developing nations. It's clearly a biased article because it refers to the laptops as "laughable" and "junk". The article, perhaps intentionally, generalizes on the state of developing countries and fails to mention that many people in developing countries have electricity and food and water but lack computers and have schools that lack computers. Microsoft doesn't want to lose it's market share to Linux in developing countries, so it's spewing out bad publicity to discourage people from using it. Pretty much the same concept as all of the FUD we've heard before - this time it's in a different place.
I live and work (ex. pat form the UK) in a country where the average wage is $100 per month.
These people don't need electricity or basic healthcare they already have it.
But a laptop that was easily afordable would greatly enhance the standard of education for thier children and help to raise the general populace beyond a basic existance into the 21st century.
I'm sorry but "Marketwatch" has failed to understand the implications of this project for the middle tier countries of this planet.
Yes the poorest of the poor will never benifit from advances in technology becaause they don't have the basics, but ex soviet countries (like the one I'm living in) have a basic infrastructure and require technological advancements like this to stop themselves falling behind the rest of the world
Paul Gogarty
If you expect MSN to have ANY positive coverage on this particular (ahem- Linux powered) appliance then maybe you also expect Fox News to start discussion Mr. Bush's ignorance of foreign policy. I mean, it's just NOT going to happen.
Microsoft is just sour because the operating system is running Linux, and Linux is getting mindshare that microsoft can't touch, because their over-priced, buggy, low-productivity bloatware is too expensive, and too fat to fit on this system. Free software is clean, lean, fast, bug and virus free, and infinitely less expensive than microsofts. Bill Gates is just being a sore loser (microsoft is being a sore loser too). The mind share they speak of is paid microsoft subscriptions, even though the people using this technology cannot in any way afford their sky-high prices. Microsoft is bashing software in a market they cannot possibly get, but just because someone else is doing well, and it isn't them, means they have to bellyache. What a sorry bunch of sots they are.
I guess this guy hasn't been to the market lately I can't feed myself for $100 a year, much less a village.
Applications for the program had to be submitted by senior government officials, e.g., Minister of Education, with the expectation that up to 1 million laptops would be deployed in each country that was accepted. As others have noted, the countries selected for the initial round are not the world's poorest countries, but rather developing countries that are able to support the project in a meaningful way. These countries include Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Libya, and Nigeria. There's a lot of information about the project, including a Wiki, at http://www.laptop.org/
There's some interesting technology in these machines, including the wind-up battery and the mesh network capability. It's also notable that the operating system is a variant of RedHat Linux. Millions of children will see a Linux desktop in their first exposure to a computer. That also means Firefox rather than IE as a browser.
I'm very anxious to see how this project works in its first deployments. I can think of some areas of the US that would also benefit from this project. If OLPC is a big success elsewhere, it could push the US Department of Education to put the US in the same category as these developing countries so that American kids in impoverished areas can also benefit from this project.
From the NY times article "What the World Needs Now Is DDT" By TINA ROSENBERG Published: April 11, 2004 "People surveyed in rural Africa about what they would like to buy listed a bed net as only the sixth product on their wish list. The first three were a bicycle, a radio and, most heartbreakingly, a plastic bucket."
Yes, we could be feeding villages with the money. But with increased education that comes from computers, villages could be feeding themselves. Tools that enable people to rise out of their situation and change it for themselves and those around them are vastly more important than continued handouts. That's what this project is about. I'd rather see one fly-on-the-face African kid start a website, or write an app, or just learn something useful that generates enough money for his village then see that same village get a bunch of food but still not know how to get it themselves.
or else!
How is a 1000% maintenance cost reasonable?
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I disagree with this article on three points. Saying "what went wrong" before anything has happened is silly. The thing is not released into the mainstream yet. Nothing has gone wrong. The bit about the light of the screen lighting up the hut is really ignorant. They aren't giving these things out in war zones or ultimate poverty zones. It's insulting, making it seems as if the people that get the machines are mud-covered extras in an Indianna Jones movie. "They don't need laptops, they're poor savages." They're for areas that have economies and infastructure but not great ones. Hell, parts of the US qualify. It's tool for communication, like the wind-up radio. The "sopping up mind-share time" doesn't really make sense either. It's not as if we're kidnapping guys working on engineering corn and making them design a laptop or anything. It seems to me that any help is good help.
Spot on, and already proven by history. I can't remember when I read the article - it was at least 20 years ago - but when the author correlated specific technology with economic growth in the Third World, he found that communications technology (telegraph or telephone) was by far the most positive contributor. As an example, he discussed the case of an African village where locals were selling lumber for much less than it would cost farther down river. Once they got a telegraph station, they were able to compare rates downstream with their prices, and relatively quickly adjust their prices to get a larger profit. Any new communications technology, as MacLuhan pointed out, results in increased wealth.
The potential benefits of the $100 laptop are enormous. Let's just look at AIDS; the amount of disinformation in Africa is legend. Some men believe having sex with a virgin will cure them; this often leads to the rape of young girls. Having access to reliable information may save thousands of young girls from needless pain.
Let's use another metaphor: irrigation. We have made enormous gains in agricultural productivity thanks to irrigation. And that's just adding water to a field. Now, we're talking about irrigating villages with knowledge. Surely even the most Philistine must admit that the potential benefits are without limit. These are minds thirsting for knowledge, and we can now turn on the spigot.
There is a generation of killers being trained in Africa today. Our best hope of combatting them is to provide more and more African people with access to knowledge, information, and communication.
What was once true, is no longer so
putting a desktop in the desert (or rainforest) with winblows & crappy internet is been done a lot.
they break, have virusses all over, 40pct of traffic is from botnets, another 40pct of pc's trying to download ms patches and failing and retrying. wich leaves very little to surf.
some specific hardware would make a lot of sense out here.
reinier, uganda
I am perhaps a bit more interested in people learning how to think, rather then filling people's minds with loads of unneccessary data. Radios do that. Books do that. Radios give one-way line of communication. Radio HAM is far too expensive and doesn't quite do the trick. What can people learn by using laptops that can't be done with books? Well... geometry -- compare textbook geometry to the touch and feel of computer geometry systems. And guess what? Great early civilizations learnt geometry first, then became great (not ONLY because of geometry, of course). Other "experimental mathematics" is the holy grail of learning that the computer might bring to people. It develops the analytic mind, unlike the modified and adopted history textbook or radio news that complies to the govermental intepretation of the past. Programming and other structural thinking is also a neccesity that made civilizations great. So, a laptop has all the benefits of a library, plus gives people the opportunity to learn how to think and then to help themselves in a way that doesn't seem to reach them. And all that is done without the Internet. Now, with the Internet, you also have means of communicating and trade. Summing up, the laptop: 1) is a compact library 2) teaches people how to think and analyze, better than anything yet invented 3) enables people to test their ideas on various things, once they've learned how to use it 4) makes communication and trade a LOT easier. Think about it. 'ave fun! Sinisa
A nice definition, but where did it come from?
I tend to regard this end of Europe as the first world, first and third is orthogonal to old and new, and capacity to do damage may not be the best decider.
I recall a description of the USA as "not a first world country, more like a very rich third world one" and while it is as wrong as most capsule descriptions and soundbites, there is a grain of truth there.
Assuming that this is the same guy, here's what John Walker (one of the founders of AutoDesk (AutoCAD, AutoLisp, 3DStudio, etc.)) had to say about his run-in with G. Pascal Zachary as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal:
Reporter at Work
Curse you plastic mold maker!
I think a better approach would be a more moderate approach, like giving them access to email. Come up with some wireless repeater mechanism and villages could communicate with each other.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
You, sir or madam, are probably the worst troll I've seen in a long time, but I'll feed you anyway.
So, computers are somewhat more convenient for learning geometry. So what? They don't make it considerably easier than learning from textbooks and from teachers. And where I live (Switzerland), we still learn geometry from textbooks too, and not with computers. It works fine, and to the best of my knowledge it is done that way in just about every other European country, with decent results. (Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.)
Great early civilizations learnt [sic] geometry first, then became great (not ONLY because of geometry, of course).
How does this have anything to do with anything? We're talking about people in poverty here, not savages trying to come down from the trees and build a civilisation. In today's global age, there is not a single country left where geometry is completely unknown. Of course, maybe the man on the street doesn't know too much about it in some countries, but how will that help him? He is in debt, his fields are suffering from drought, he doesn't have any medical care, he has no electricity or running water - but at least he learned geometry from his hand-powered laptop. Yay!
Programming and other structural thinking is also a neccesity that made civilizations great.
[...]
I am perhaps a bit more interested in people learning how to think, rather then filling people's minds with loads of unneccessary [sic] data.
Yes, because you don't need any facts or knowledge to think for yourself. Who cares whether people are familiar with history and learn to analyse present-day political situations from that? Let's teach them BASIC, then they'll have analytical minds and will be able to think for themselves! Yay!
As for access for the internet, I already explained in my previous post why I think that a laptop is by far not the best way to sort that out. And you have done nothing to address the disadvantages of laptops over libraries that I have pointed out.
Once again: Laptops offer some benefits over textbooks, but no vital ones. Their disadvantages over textbooks, however, are vast: Expensive to produce, easily broken, not as accessible, requires electricity, requires tutoring to use, harder to keep around and distribute in areas where certain knowledge is persecuted.
And, if you still think computers are so vital to learning, when do you think Western civilisation started out? In 1982, with the release of the Commodore 64? Or perhaps even earlier, with the release of the Apple II? Hmm.
Basilisk Digital
Computers may not have been vital to learning before their development, but computers gave a large spectrum of new methods of teaching old knowledge in a much more vivid fashion.
I agree, a laptop doesn't irrigate fields, and does not cure that many diseases. That's not it's job. It's job is to (exponentially) accelerate learning of more important things and make as much knowledge as accessible as possible. A smaller public library (for a population of, say 5,000 people) is rarely of any real use to anything but lowest level schooling and a lot of useless propaganda or similar literature. A computer, even without Internet access, can be much better in that aspect.
We are past the times when you had MIR publishers in USSR that published most of world's up to date textbooks and expert literature at really low prices in most languages (Western languages, USSR languages, 3rd world languages, etc.). Similar attempts of either lower price printing or donating books is commendable, and it definelty doesn't go against the ideas of OLPC -- they're not complementary, but are targeted at the same goal -- creating an enviroment for modern development, perhaps skiping some steps of industrial and educational development. The only problem is that unlike MIR's publishing focus -- mathematics and similar, these foundations concentrate on humanities and social sciences -- and these aren't anywhere close to the real need.
Let me explain the "great civilisational" illustration a bit. It might have sounded like I was trying to educate "savages on trees", but I was reffering to a historical precedent on an importance of a certain concept that may be, especially in poor countries, below the level of elementary geometry as known to the Egyptians (how to contruct a right angle, a certain distance, etc.). There are currently far too many people even in developed countries that don't know such elementary and important geometric concepts.
Why do I keep insisting on geometry, you might ask? Not only has it had the most profound effect on the development of any civilization, it is by far the easiest way of introducing people the idea of formal reasoning (after all, "the axiomatic method" was originally called "the geometric method").
There are so many ways of teaching history. And so many histories to be taught. Materialist, nationalist, this-ideology-based, that-ideology-based, conforming-to-our-dear-president's-work, our-enemies-were-our-enemies-for-centuries-based, we-are-at-war-and-have-always-been-at-war-with-eur asia-based... As a saying goes "God found out that he can't change hitory, so he invented historians." We had many of these histories recently taught in Croatia -- you (probobly) know what that led to -- a war. Of course, not just that, but the main claims were centuries of waiting for a state, nationalist romantic ideals et cetera. Facts were a lot more on the side of economy and some corporate interests.
I agree, one has got to be exposed to many historical fact in order to fully appreciate his/her present situation. But a critical mind is not developed through teaching or learning history -- it's, after all, history that taught us that noone ever learns from history. If we help develop a society like a 1930ies Germany, 1990-Yugoslavia or something worse we will lose. We will lose all our effort. Our effort becomes entropy, or worse -- bloodsheds.
"Our" goal here is somewhat like that of an University according to E.W. Dijkstra -- not to give what the society (replace with poor countries), but rather give what the society (replace again) needs.
Now, for your points on disadvantages of laptops:
1) price:
Are there currently technologies to produce laptops in such massive amounts? No. There are technologies to produce laptops in somewhat massive numbers, but this is an order (or even more then one) of magnitutde larger. OLPC is here to create a somewhat aritificial demand so that such technologies might develop. The end result: lowering of price and new
Indeed, just supplying email would be useful. But this probably isn't any easier. The simplest approach would be to just supply IP connectivity via a basic internet hookup. Email, wikipedia, google, and everything else would follow from that with no extra effort.
I have seen firsthand the effect that email can have, though. For example, in the early 90's I was in Finland and visited some relatives of friends. They lived on a small farm way up north. They had just decided that it was time to harvest a field of cabbage. So they did what small farmers in their area had learned to do: They sent out email asking for bids on the crop. Later that day, they had sold the crop to a local grocery supply company and arranged for it to be picked up a few days later. Then they went to work picking the cabbage and piling it onto their truck.
They also commented that they were looking forward to the advent of wireless. Not because they really wanted it themselves. It was for the benefit of the guy who would pick up the crop. A few years before, he had worked for a big national trucking firm. With the advent of email, he had bought himself a truck, and started his own local business. He knew all the growers in the area, and most of the grocers, and they all trusted each other. But his business would be easier if he could have a small computer with wireless email in his truck. That way, he wouldn't have to stop off at home several times a day to check his email.
I'd bet that the OLPC effort could easily lead to this sort of thing all over, as the children grew up knowing how to use their tiny wireless computer. If it supplied cheap, portable email, people like these farmers and truckers could set up their own local businesses and give fast local service to their area in a way that few big companies could manage.
But as useful as email is, it's just one useful tool. Imagine the benefits of being able to use google the way we're doing now. Such local operations could really benefit from being able to do an "end run" around their local entrenched political powers, and deal directly with the outside world without all the barriers that exist now.
Of course, a certain skepticism is in order. They'll all have to learn about internet scams, just as we have.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
If you read my comment, you will notice that I say absolutely nothing either in favour of, or against, Milton Friedman's ideas. I merely point out that the grandparent has not understood them. That would be you, eh? My economics is not great, but at least I know what a zero-sum game is.
I'm VERY EXCITED about the attention to the features I desire. I want the OLPC for me! With the screen in 200dpi black and white mode, and sipping power with no backlight on, I could actually find it a decent book reading experience in the park.
And I am ENTHRALLED with the latest power supply. (Not the old crank design.) I've always wanted a tredle powered laptop and now somebody is listening. I totally need that generator for camping trips, and it will beat out all those small solar panels they are installing. (Way cheaper and works at night!) And it will beat out all the crank designs.
I think it will help students a lot. Even if all it does is bring Python and Wikipedia.
You are correct. My "zero-sum" comment was in error. I was thinking of only one small part of Friedman's ideas, the notion that GDP is a quality-measure of an economy. In an economy of 500 people if there was one "Bill Gates" who makes $1000 and 499 "peasants" who make $1, that does NOT make it a "better" economy than one where "Big Bill" makes $500 and the peasants make $1.90, even though the GDP is smaller in the latter. Wealth does not "trickle down" after a certain threshold of differential is reached. We have passed that differential long ago. I'd say about 1900.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The only "failure" is that the $100 Laptop is useless as a vehicle for selling proprietary software. Remember, Microsoft et al have a perverse take on an old saying that goes "Give a man a fish and he'll come back the next day for more fish. Teach a man to fish and you can sell him expensive proprietary bait for life."
Some -- and it just takes a few -- of the kids that get into using this thing are going to become programmers, and Open Source is all they're ever going to have known. That's what the closed-source people find scary. Even the likes of Microsoft know that Open Source is going to win in the end, because it is simply better. The difference is that if OLPC takes off, the final victory of Open Source will occur within their lifetimes.
And MSCEs will find out what it feels like to work hard for a qualification, and then find suddenly it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I immediately discount anything he writes. He just likes to take contrarian positions to irritate readers.
Shall we need say anything more?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What the fuck are you doing? Oh wait, your are an AC, you don't even show your fucking face and stand for your opinions.
Oh Well...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Right, but did Milton Friedman think that? I honestly don't know, but I would have assumed he would (like most orthodox economists) believe that interpersonal comparison of utility is impossible - so the two situations you describe are incomparable. (Which, in my view, is just as daft, and arguably just as right wing, but in a different way.)