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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.
... ask what cannot be done and then go do it.
This is retarded. The laptops cost $100. I don't go around telling people my laptop cost me $1500 bucks when I only spent $700 on it. Training costs money. Duh. But this project is not about training. Its about providing access to a tool.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Basically, by rooting for this thing to fail is basically saying you hate children. If you honestly think you can do better, THEN DO IT. This is the only effort on this scale ever attempted to use computers to educate globally. They'd rather kids either not have computers at all or have a full fledged computer that the TCO would be 10,000 dollars (by his metrics). Jesus christ people, if the thing is really as bad as people keep claiming it is, it will fall on its face immediately no thanks to you. You shouldn't want it to fail. However, it seems to be doing pretty well so far. They've got a lot of support from some really smart people. It seems uneducated armchair quarterbacks and competing companies have the biggest beef. Very few people whom complain actually have the goal OLPC does: To make the world a better place.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Yeah and how much of that wad will go to local business people who figured out they can make a living off it? why is this a bad thing?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
So you want me to develop a micro-credit model for poor nations? Because I'm a computer scientist. When will you get it through your head that these are computer scientists trying to do something within their reach for these people? Seriously, we're not wasting an economist's time nor could your average economist even do that. I hate to break it to you, but what your hero Yunus did, I cannot. I apologize for my sever shortcomings.
I'm confused here, do you want me to become super rich and donate to these micro-economic programs? Are you telling me to just magically become an economic genius? I'm sure this guy is a great speaker too, are you expecting me to become that? This guy invented a great banking system, am I just supposed to copy him? Seriously, your comment leaves me quite confused.
Thanks for the suggestion. Keep trying to deter people who are only trying to do what they are best at to help other people. Spread the FUD, keep it up, bro.
My work here is dung.
Pure FUDD... If you follow the nested links to the actual hatin' on the OLPC, you find out that most of the $970 figure is a $542 estimate of the cost of internet access, per laptop, spread over 5 years. The other estimates (training, lossage) may be reasonable, but this knocks it into lala land.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Some thoughts:
"The cost is more like $900 per laptop"
What was the hidden cost of rolling out a dozen million Apple II and C64 to a population almost entirely untrained in using and maintaining computers? Has the US economy recovered yet?
"Teachers must be trained on how to use a computer and the internet"
And this is bad how?
Gosh, if we give free books to the kids, we will eventually have to teach them to read ! Shudder...
"Extra money will have to be spent on the network infrastructure"
Why not spent the money on something useful, like fighter jets, or a new, shiny cathedral ?
Once this telecoms infrastructure is in place, these kids will compete for our jobs in call-centers and software development.
Shouldn't we teach them something practical instead, like carving wooden figurines they can sell to tourists?
Consider this scenario. You are a windows user. You have been convinced to switch to a Mac. Your new Mac laptop may cost about 1000USD. Then you find out that: 1. All your windows software doesn't work. So you need to buy the version for Mac (office, photoshop...). 2. You decide to run windows on it, so you buy a windows license. 3. Training. Count all these options, and the price of your laptop is twice the original. Does it mean the actual price of the laptop is 2000USD? No. The same goes for OLPC laptop. The machine itself costs 140 USD, period. The infrastructure (networking) and training are something different. Similarly, if you want to upgrade a public library, the cost of a book is the price on the cover, not the price of that plus the price of the infrastructure itself (the building, bills, etc).
It's typical of adults to underestimate how quickly kids learn to do stuff like that themselves if they have the chance - I was replacing components on my C64 by the time I was 8-9 years old, based purely on having diagrams in the manual, despite the fact it was in English (English is my second language - I didn't know a word of English apart from BASIC keywords at the time). Of course not everyone would learn that way, but you don't need everyone to - just a reasonable percentage.
I also note that the article repeats the same old bullshit about lack of access to electricity etc. as a hindrance for internet access - blatantly ignoring that this isn't really the case for the countries signed up so far AND the fact that the unit depends on mesh networking of the boxes themselves to expand the reach of the network, and falling back to the hand crank as a last resort for providing electricity to the unit itself exactly to reduce the infrastructure requirements.
He's also coming out with ignorant statements like "naturally all the countries will be taking out loans to cover this purchase". Ignoring that one of the poorest countries to sign up so far - Nigeria - repaid $10 BILLION in debt over the last couple of years, and as a result got developed nations to forgive another $18 BILLION, saving them many times the cost of the OLPC purchase they'll be making EVERY YEAR in interest payments. The $10 billion was paid back thanks to increasing oil revenue, which is now also freed up for other purposes after the debt repayment is over.
The countries signed up so far aren't the poorest in the world - they are developing countries with reasonable economies. There's no reason why they'd need to take up loads to cover a purchase costing them a few hundred million.
I don't know one way or another whether they can provide $100 laptops to children in third world slums (MIT, right?).
BUT having spent a fair bit of time in some of the worst places on earth, including favelas and S. Asian slums... I can't see what makes them think this is a good idea. Maybe I'm cynical.
First, are all those people supposed to just magically pick up a computer and know how to use it? We're talking about very very poor people who make $1-2 a day and can't read or write on average. This fact can't have been lost on the MIT people, so what gives? I know for a fact that in Rio the problem in the favelas isn't getting their hands on computers, but rather getting instructors and teachers to come train kids how to use them. This sort of upsets me, as I really like Brazilians in general and it seems like when they explicitly ask for teachers rather than things, we should listen. Couldn't MIT do a training exchange program instead, or even at the same time?
Second. Handing a 10 or 12 year old slum kid in asia a computer worth a couple months salary isn't going to help him unless one has a way to make sure he can hold onto it. What's to stop the slum bosses from stealing all the machines that are handed out the moment the westerners leave? I've been hearing about this grand plan for a while, and it doesn't seem very well thought out.
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum"
Aside from that, with all that whining about "training" etc. he really comes across (to me at least) like a spoiled first worlder: "No way those kids are going to benefit from this without a $1000/hour consultant to whine at about broken "cup holders", an office with A/C, water cooler and a personal secretary."
It's also: A machine that will break easily (disk drive with mechanical movements), requires far to much electricity to be viable in areas with unreliable electrical supply, isn't rugged enough to withstand rough treatment from children etc.
The far bigger problem is what's the point of giving some one starving a $100 laptop then telling them they can't sell it when that much money would feed some poor families for 4 months? Seems criminal in some ways. 90% have zero hope of making a living with computers so it seems well intentioned but a real let them eat cake program. Trust me they'd rather have the cake, or some rice, than a computer.
And you are yet another one of the people falling in the trap of assuming that this is being given to starving people. Get it into your head: ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE of people in developing countries are starving. MOST have enough to eat. MOST have somewhere to live. This isn't targeted at those who have nothing, but at those who can sustain themselves and who are in a situation where anything that can help their children get a better education to improve their life is high priority.
NONE of the countries signed up so far have any significant starvation problem. NONE of them are among the most desperately poor.
All you've done is yet again repeat stereotypes of the developing world that has no root in reality.
Intel has their "Classmate PC"... which they claim will be $400. Most of the additional expense being the extra hardware needed to run Windows XP... oh and the Trusted Computing TPM that cheap laptops for poor kids absolutely MUST have. After all, what would they do without hardware DRM and iron control by Microsoft/Intel over what can run on the machine?
Jon Camfield, a writer for OLPC News and master's degree candidate in the International Science and Technology Program at George Washington University, says that 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.
To extend the reasoning, we shouldn't give food to the poor, because the cost of kitchen cabinets, cookbooks, culinary training, pots and pans, and refrigeration hasn't been adequately factored in or demonstrated as being cost-effective in a real-world test case.
We shouldn't give away free books because the cost of opthalmologists and optometrists haven't been considered, let alone the requisite infrastructure of bookshelves, bookmarks and tables and chairs and reading lamps. Also, the health risks of children carrying heavy loads to and from schools, and the economic livelihoods of book publishers may also be adversely impacted.
It's easy to say something won't work, I guess. On the other hand, I wonder wherein lies the motivation for so many people to go to so much trouble to crush something that offers nothing but endless possibilites. It's fashionable to be a cynic, but when it comes to kids, that kind of thinking should be left at the door.
Shadow,
I understand the ideal and the sentiment, and no doubt in many places it'll work like a charm. But in one of the cities mentioned, Rio, they already have more than enough computers at the childrens center (in Rosina, the largest favela). The bosses of the favelas can't get people to risk the violence (which isn't even around the childrens center) to go give classes and training.
In Dhaka, another location I've heard mentioned, one of the industries is assembling computers. The problem there is that there's no sewers, no clean water, nothing in the slums (they walk through raw waste to go to work). There's a lot of decent coders there, as English is the administrative language, but for people in the slums??? There's no law there, and the children aren't educated at all. So for other than the upper middle class (which isn't much), the offer of machines that'll be sold or stolen is just exploiting their poverty.
I don't personally approve here unless there's more of a plan than hand outs for the cameras. The third world isn't a zoo, and unless the MIT people are going to go the full distance they shouldn't go period, as they'll cause more harm than good to the people they say they want to help.
"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatum"
Is the off the shelf rugged enough? What happens when they connect to the internet and get a spyware infection? Windows does not have a good reputation in this direction.
Is windows so entrenched in their region that they could not use OO.org or a lightweight office application? Can they read the screen in the sun? Does the more expensive laptop use it's wireless to automatically link up with other laptops?
Once the battery is depleted in a couple years, can they get a replacement battery cheaply? Can they can power (manually crank) the laptop with a seperate device like the OLPC can?
Do you believe in giving people only food, like giving a man a fish, or would you like to give him a useful tool that could help them compete economically and perhaps lead them to self-sufficiency?
If you factor in all the training costs to teach a child to read, the true cost of a book must be several thousand dollars. So we should stop teaching the children and close all schools.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You mean like linux, where there is an installed base of only a
couple of million machines, and virtually no professional software development?
Maybe you want to have a look at http://sourceforge.net/
I don't personally approve here unless there's more of a plan than hand outs for the cameras. The third world isn't a zoo, and unless the MIT people are going to go the full distance they shouldn't go period, as they'll cause more harm than good to the people they say they want to help.
Just like the tabloids criticizing celebrities for adopting third-world children. It's fine to question movitation, intent and commitment, but at the end of the day they've done something and you haven't. It's always the people on their asses that seem to worry most about a population's integrity.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
When everyone has one, what's the point of stealing one? Who are you going to sell it to?
Your biggest market would be eBay'ing it to nerds who want to write software for it, because of it's general unavailability in first world countries. This option immediately goes away as soon as they ram production and start providing them for higher (but still low) cost to developers who want one to hack code on/play with.
Or to put it in Monty Python terms:
-- Terry
OLPC is just a name. Each child will not be getting their own laptop. More likely each child will get 15 minutes or to play with it during the day time shared among other students. It's just like no child left behind program it doens't literally mean no child left behind.
Although these issues must be addressed thoughtfully, this suggestion is similar to previous generations' objections to literacy, suffrage, and property rights for "the masses."
1. Oh no! What will happen if we let the masses have (x)?
2. How can they know how to manage (x) responsibly? ( by responsibly, they mean: like we prefer them to )
3. So let's not give it to them!
Honestly. It's silly to discourage the development of hardware on the basis that training isn't in place. Of course not. There's no hardware! The lack of expertise and training is a reason for developing the technology, not against it.
Without training, the OLPC experiment will fall flat with a lack of support staff and educational curricula integration. (from the olpc article)
If you put the equipment into the hands of the people, the street will find uses for things. Black and brown people are not stupid. Like all things in life, it's a choice involving certain levels of personal risk. If people will buy one of these laptops, they're going to want training, especially if they stretched themselves financially to obtain it. They're going to be willing to trade (social and material) goods and services for that training. With increased demand for expertise, people with initiative and talent will learn the needed information and skills. This allows a local tech economy to develop. Cost analysis can't explain this situation, which involves more than payouts into something with no return.
If you feel obligated to give everyone formal classes, not only are you insulting their intelligence and controlling what they can or ought to know, but you're pre-emptively aborting certain opportunities for local economic development.
Honestly -- I learned more about computers with Slackware on a 486 (and nothing but the howtos) than most people get in a lot of computer classes. Not everyone can do this (and I'm not suggesting we just throw people in the deep end), but that's the great thing about geeks. They can cut across the traditional socio-economic boundaries because their skills make them useful; it's definitely been the case for me.
If you look at the OLPC article suggesting $970 as the TCO for one of these machines, you see how silly this really is. Ignore, for the moment, their apparent confusion over whose expenses they're describing. Look instead at their actual figures. Where did they get the $108 for initial setup? Can't you just ghost all the machines automatically? Also, how do they get away with putting a dollar value to the effect of potential future political instability on the cost of internet services?
Note: In some developing settings, the introduction of mobile phones has been bittersweet, since not everyone makes wise choices (for people in the West, wealth is a blinding, useful buffer for waste and bad choices. The poor have a different margin of error). People will sometimes go into debt to obtain a mobile (they become a status symbol, or people misunderstand their role/value, or because people have a strong desire to stay connected).
Laptops are bound to create similar issues, but laptops are fundamentally different from mobile phones in their positive, versatile potential. And the introduction of new technology always introduces complex, bittersweet social change.
But mobile phones have been a positive development. According to an article in The Economist, "the London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves."
Muhammad Yunus, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners, has said that "When you
Nonsense. A self-sufficient VSAT/WiFi station can be plunked down just about anywhere for a few thousand bucks. I do IT in the developing world for a living, so I can tell you authoritatively that the cost-effectiveness of electronic data into the village is vastly greater than shipping books. We've checked. This factors in community-based computer-centres, which are actually much heavier (in terms of capital and maintenance costs) than the OLPC model.
The big liability with regard to books is that they are difficult to protect. Most buildings in the developing world are, surprise surprise, poor quality. In tropical areas, they often don't have doors or windows, so books often barely last through a single school year. Your assumption about books being in fairly good condition might be true when they're loaded into the container, but it generally doesn't take long before they're in tatters. You'd be amazed, actually, how fast things deteriorate.
The biggest liability related to computers and electronic communications is usually power generation. Fuel is bulky and even more difficult to transport than books are. That's why OLPC is enlightened, in my opinion: It's the first such project to take autonomous power generation seriously.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Crime begins at the very lowest levels of society, and builds upon it. For every person that wants something for nothing, and there are a lot, somebody builds upon it. A job, a favor, free tickets, a free drink...
Education is probably the best defense against what you describe. I've seen both sides.
But the whole idea of the $100 dollar laptop is NOT to pay more than $100 for a laptop. You are assuming the choice is between a $600 laptop and a $100 laptop. The choice is often between a max $100 per laptop, and NO laptop. The idea of the $100 laptop is that they are affordable to purchase for millions of kids in third world countries... Once you start talking spending $600-$1000 per laptop, shit even the United States or Western Europe would have a hard time affording that.
When rich western people in the first world are trying to get third world governments to spend $1000 on a laptop, when those same first world countries would do no such thing for themselves, then shouldn't there be some concern?. It is not unusual for self-rightious rich westerns on a mission to "save the children" to get third world countries to spend money in extremly stupid ways. Some people find Jesus, other people find Computers, but both have missionaries trying to say each is the solution to problems that they might not particularly solve.
I haven't spent any money teaching my 2 children how to use a computer. They picked it up themselves.
My wife did a course, however, because she was too cautious to learn that way.
A lot of business expenses for training come from cautious grown-ups who have lost the capacity to learn for themselves.
I am anarch of all I survey.
These are kids who can barely afford food. Cover the cost of the laptop, and they'll put in the hours.
And if you really think it takes training, sit any 6-year-old down at a computer. They may not know what they're doing, but they'll do something. Take an older kid, teach them about pagedown, put some docs in front of them, and you're good.
Except this isn't a business. What you're doing is kind of like telling me that Linux is costing me more than Windows because of all the time I put into it. Actually, I like my kernel hacks, I like my bash scripts, and I do it for fun -- as far as I'm concerned, it's a benefit, not a liability. As far as I'm concerned, if Linux cost twice as much as Windows, it'd still be a steal because of all I can do with it, and trying to count "training" time for me is like factoring in "time to eat" into the cost of an ice cream bar.
In short: Businessmen have their place. I respect that. Really, I do -- without businessmen, I don't get paid. But this is not your place.
You're the businessman, you tell us.
But let me remind you of a few this. First, the laptop costs $100. Maybe $200 if you figure it'll have to be replaced, but remember: Some kid will figure out how to do the maintenance, will figure out how to use it. And you can count Internet all you want, it's not $700 worth of Internet if the mesh wireless works the way it's supposed to -- hell, they might do alright without Internet for awhile, just having wireless from village to village.
Second, this contributes to education -- even without a dime spent on a teacher. Like I said: Spend ten minutes showing them how to figure stuff out, and the rest is on the machine. Hell, beam an audio tutorial around the village if you want. It can be done.
Third, health and sanitation have to be considered, but consider also that I have pretty damned good health and sanitation, primarily because I grew up with a computer and had a decent education. In fact, with what the kids could learn from these laptops, they would be better equiped to build their own infrastructure to cover the necessities.
Remember, the primary use of these things is for kids to explore them on their own. The "users" are like your six year old who grabs your mouse and learns to play Solitaire, only they'll be starting with Linux.
We can't ignore fixing or replacing them, but we also can't ignore the ability of the kids to keep them working, and to fix or replace them by themselves. It'd be an experiment, sure, but the biggest concern would probably be theft, and if it really is one laptop per child, what's the point of theft? Why would you steal your friend's laptop when you've got one of your own? It's not like there's anyone around you can sell it to; they all have their own laptops. So theft is only an issue before we actually uncrate them and hand them out.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The nine MAFIAA member organizations (four major labels and six major movie studios minus one company that does both) have grounds to sue only infringers of those copyrights that they own. There are plenty of "textbooks and freeware and novels" that can lawfully be reproduced and distributed under blanket permission. Such works are either 1. in the public domain due to the authors' children being long dead (e.g. Gulliver's Travels), or 2. subject to copyright but licensed Freely (e.g. Krita or Wikipedia) or otherwise gratis (e.g. anything CC-*-nd or CC-*-nc) by its authors.
Seymour Papert is involved. If you read his two books on child learning you'll understand better why just a working computer is all that is required.
Education is not like business!
Tiny minds only have a hammer and see only a world of nails.
My teachers didn't teach computers, they had you learn HOW TO LEARN for yourself. Actually, the 1st teacher (4th grade) only knew how to turn it on, get us a LOGO disk, and had read Papert's 1st book.
You don't need corp style training. good lesson plans and nothing else.
Tech Support? Ask the best kid in the village or school. Break it? tough luck, you had a chance you'd not have otherwise.
Theft: put thick plastic area on it for somebody to CARVE a name deep into the casing if they do not have a deep engraver tool. 1 color + its crime for adult use.
Internet? Are you kidding me? Internet does not matter, its optional. In many cases it is better they do not have internet. Forcing the kids to work together and share so they can use the things is far more important, helps if the teachers do this as well.
They can still network with each other.
Software? Hopefully for their own good, they have little software. Unless you want to raise worthless users like here in the USA who think pop software training & for dummy books means they can use a computer (and act almost like its some sort of magic box.)
My high school to this day only teaches typing, they expect kids coming in to figure out the rest.
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