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The True Cost of One Laptop Per Child
An anonymous reader writes "The '$100 laptop' Negroponte is hoping to put in the hands of millions of kids in developing nations may actually be more like the '$900 laptop.' From the article, 'Jon Camfield says...once maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account, the actual cost of each laptop rises to more than $970. This, he says, doesn't even take in to account the additional costs associated with theft, loss, or accidental damage. Camfield contends that such an expensive undertaking should at least be field-tested in pilot programs designed to establish the viability of the project before asking countries to invest millions, or perhaps billions, of dollars.'" Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
If you RTFA, and then RTFA the article from which the Newsforge article is derived, you'll find that the source is beyond biased - the news they post makes Fox look "fair and balanced," which I don't believe Fox is.
Newsforge, please allow John Dvorak to do his job. Riling up the geeks is easy to do, but the market isn't that big and John needs to make his paycheck. If John hasn't spouted off about how OLPC will do nothing for the developing world, you can expect him to do so.
$970 for a laptop. That is one hell of a total cost of ownership (TCO) argument. The number is preposterous, and in my experience, most total cost of ownership arguments are bunk because the cost estimates are so inaccurate as to be useless.
W
...is to be ABLE to train people on it, so they can learn more valuable skills, and also have access to more information. Further, "internet connectivity" isn't absolutely necessary; rather than run broadband to hundreds of points out in nowhere land, things can get started by setting up an isolated LAN with a single web server. Ship 'em a couple of 250 gig HDs full of goodies, like textbooks and freeware and novels and movies, and they'll be okay until the broadband is in place.
... "internet connectivity" isn't absolutely necessary; rather than run broadband to hundreds of points out in nowhere land, things can get started by setting up an isolated LAN with a single web server
Or good old "sneakernet", where you carry the disk (or memory stick) from one machine to another when you want to transfer some info.
I was here when broadband was a guy on a bus with a backpack full of floppies, dialing toll-call long-distance from Michigan to Indian Hill Il so I could exchange email (at dollars a call) was a breakthrough in connectivity, and changing resistors on the modem board to raise it from 110 to 300 baud was a major bump in bandwidth. We got a lot of stuff done in those days, too. It was MUCH better than NOTHING. This is the kind of thing people used as they developed stuff that was better.
Third-world countries have already done "networking" by mounting a battery-powered computer plus WiFi AP on a bike and riding a cricuit from town to town. At each town the local machine(s) swap files (including email) with the one on the bike as it goes by, and one of the towns has a connection to the rest of the world. The latency may be severe but the bandwidth of a big hard disk on a bicycle is more than adequate to support serious networking for a province, while the local skills are developed to put in their own successor network.
It's not just a toy. Email-by-bike is a major labor saving versus paper mail. That cost saving can be used both to enable more communication and to free hands for creating other value. And by creating a community of users who'd like more an d better, you KNOW that one of the first targets will be to improve it further.
How long before people in villages connected by "bikenet" decide they want something better, find out how to build pringles-can or big-ugly-dish antennas, and start hopping their WiFi over the hills between? B-)
That's how WE got the internet in the first place: being unsatisfied with the early, slow, expensive ways of networking and building ever better, faster, cheaper-per-bit upgrades. Why shouldn't people in third world countries be able to do something analogous on their own, once they can get their hands on the necessary technology?
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The funny thing is the estimate notes the exist agreement by SES to provide free bandwidth and to develop and downlink station for rural villages expected to keep costs at about $1/laptop/year for internet access but assumes that SES will abandon the deal after the first year. No substantial basis is given for this assumption.
From here. And again, from OLPC itself:
So yes, some of the individuals being targeted by this campaign are living in conditions where the offer of a laptop is superfluous at best, patronizing at worst. OLPC seems to be implying that, yes, these people do have nothing. So even given access to all the information in the world, what exactly does OLPC think anyone is going to do with this knowledge? They can't make something out of nothing. They couldn't start an e-business if they wanted to--that implies they have banks, rule of law, transportation infrastructure, etc. Are the laptops designed to precipitate revolution so these things become more feasible? Who knows. If they're not giving every child a generator that can produce electricity for all sorts of cheap appliances, perhaps a printed copy of the entire Wikipedia for every child would be more useful than a laptop: then they'd have information and fuel.
Complete and utter bollocks as far as most of the third world and ex-soviet block is concerned (which are the target market for one laptop per child).
There crime starts at the highest level of society and goes down to the bottom as a parallel economy which is quite often more efficient than the white economy of the western world.
Example 1: During the years of the ex-yugoslavian wars and the embargo on Serbia Bulgarian trains ran like clockwork. I had to meet my significant other every second week and the cross country express was never ever a minute late. Guess why - there were two petrol trains shadowing it. One in front, one in the back. Unmarked. In broad dailyight. Travelling in perfect synchronicity at express speed. Towards Serbia. You think that was run by the lowest levels of sosciety? Give me a break, whoever dunnit had half of the railway management on payroll. And they achieved the impossible - absolute schedule precision on the mainline down to the seconds. As a result the 3 trains showed up as a single train on all systems, documents, everywhere. Hidden in plain sight from the UN inspectors.
Example 2: Recently one of the mafia heads in Bulgaria was about to stand trial for possessing an illegal arms collection (actually only 2 out of 42 weapons in his possession did not have proper documents). Who do you think were his lawyers? The ex-prosecutor general and the ex-minister of internal affairs. Lowest levels of sosciety - my arse...
Situations like the above exist all over the world and USA and Europe with their selfrighteous halfarsed interventions into local conflicts have fed them for years. The Bulgarian and Romanian mafia has fed on the embargo for nearly 8 years. The same Bulgarian mafia together with the Baltic states underworld has fed on channeling surplus ex-Warsaw pact weaponry to Chechnia for nearly 10 years. There were two flights loaded by unmarked trucks from Sofia airport every week to Rostov-na-Don in Russia. None of them has ever arrived with more then 10% cargo in Rostov-na-Don and they for some "unknown" reason requested NOTAMs (notices for airman) for low level altitude winds in Northern Caucasus every time. Fairly obvious where they went. Where did all the training jet aircraft from Poland, Germany, Hungary, etc go in the 90? They were last seen in the Baltic republics being refurbished for combat. After that noone saw them and you know what - I believe the Russians when they say that they destroyed 100+ armed and ready for combat aircraft at Hankala on the first day of the first Chechen war. You call that coming from low levels of society? We are talking government involvment here with fully blown parallel economies and assistance from some well known organisations located in Langley and on the Thames bank.
And that is in Europe - right under our noses. I do not even want to get started about Afrika. Just look at stellar examples of law and order like Nigeria where the anticorruption commission ended up being the front for bribe collections or Swazi or a few others.
Low level of sosciety... Give me a break...
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