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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.
... the Nigerians won't have any problems paying for theirs.
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
once maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account, the actual cost of each laptop rises to more than $970.
/., of course I don't have a wife.
Oh yeah? And if I replace all my locks, give the bum on the corner a buck, rent a whore off the side of the street for 2 hours in my back seat, buy a tank of gas, stop by the bar and buy a round for everyone, and get a bouquet of roses for my wife, I can buy a gallon of milk for $970 too.
Just kidding, this is
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.
Averaging the more expensive hardware with the reaming for software, I'm sure the alternative is $2000 or $3000 overall cost per laptop. Thank goodness for open source!
an additional 3 yr warranty that covers for any damage and provides replacement for any failed parts totally free of charge. all these for just for additional $300.00
We also have 5 yr insurance plan for just $5/day towards any unforeseen mental or physical health damage that this might cause you.
We appreciate your business and we would like to offer you Negroponte Credit Card that provides 15% discount on any future products that you buy from us. Remember all this is available for limited time only
Total: $100 laptop + $300 warranty + $200 accessories + $500 insurance - 15% = $900
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
In this case, I wonder if it's to discredit the whole idea, or to inflate the perception of the price so Wintel can compete.
(shrug)
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The "fine" article says
Training?... Uhh, we are talking about poor people here that would _never_ have a computer let alone training. This is not some stupid business expense that we can write off or do some MS-Magic(tm) and make it look like an MS-Solution(tm) would cost less. We are talking about humans that will get a pretty cheap laptop and will... you know... put in the time to learn what they have been given. We are not talking about "rich" Americans or Europeans where having a computer is expected. These laptops are going to people that would never have a laptop... ever.
It is pretty sick to me that some business idiot would try to justify costs going by typical business expenses.
I know what is coming next. Some MS-Study(tm) will show how the OLPC will be more "cost effective" if Microsoft were paid their fees instead of using Linux.
OLPC is pretty cool. I hope they succeed and do well. I hope the corporate greed of MS doesn't get in the way. However, with the recent activity of MS with regards to the OLPC, MS has their sites set on getting a piece of the pie. That can only mean corporate greed will take over the project and poor kids around the world will suffer because of it.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
The hardware is not that low powered. Secondly, you just take the $970 figure as fact with no scrutiny. You really must be a shill for someone. Maybe Microsoft? They are creating a competitor of OLPC now. This is not a wasteful program. It is a great way to get technology in the hands of poor students. It doesn't need an Internet connection because it is built to work as a mesh network. It will not need training because that is the point of these things. Students will teach themselves how to use these things. Once they learn how to use a simple User Interface this knowledge will carry over to other types of interfaces. Just like you and I learn to use a computer on Windows 3.1 and now use XP with no problem. So the whole premise of the article is ludicrous! This is not a purchase for a company. This is a purchase for students to learn on.
... what's the cost of a regular laptop, or the competing project from Intel? Sounds like a Haggard Sony Enthusiast to me.
-theGreater.
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?
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
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).
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.
It's been said from the beginning that the cost was just for producing the hardware.
Frankly, I still don't entirely understand why there is such a huge push to distribute laptops to the world. Books are far more durable and require no training or infrastructure (though teachers help). And then there's medicine and other necessities. Even if laptops end up being distributed to many of these locations, I expect the majority of them to go unused either from lack of interest or infrastructure, or simply to break. I think the idea of offering resources or education to impoverished areas is a noble goal, but this particular plan has always seemed tremendously impractical.
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.
...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.
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"
from TFA
'maintenance, training, Internet connectivity, and other factors are taken into account'
maintenance - Most breakdown are software. The neighborhood geek fixes it (nice for budding slashdotters - be nice or your olpc doesn't get fixed).
training - most kids teach themselves, their friends.
Internet Connectivity - The basic idea is to have a mesh network for olpc's. I can imagine a lot of peer to peer content and web sites. Hmm . interesting research.
other factors ? -- probably even less compelling that these.
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."
From my own experience, I can tell you that a "low power" machine tends to *teach* while a high end machine makes a great toy! A computing devices purpose is to ... compute. I cant wait to see some bright hackers squeezing the last clock cycle out of this machine. <br>BTW, how many "developers" still know how to code in x86 assembler...or even try to optimize some inner loop in machine language?<br>Anyone? No?<br> I for myself, mostly work in Python, Java, C++ and C# nowadays. I just miss the nearness to the machine I had when working in C and ASM. <br>Viva 6510,Z80,68000,8086 ... there you learn how to code, my dear .Net monkeys!
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
I thought the point was that the kids would be able to teach themselves.
Wasn`t that the point behind the intuitive Sugar interface?
And I am not sure how wise it would be to give direct Internet access
to each child. I thought the laptops were able to create mesh networks,
so you could just load one laptop with textbook files (on a USB drive?), and
they would be available to every OLPC in the area.
Even ignoring the above, high training/Internet costs in these countries are due to the lack
of infrastructure. Infrastructure represents fixed costs that can be diluted
with volume, decreasing the price per unit. "Per unit" should just be the variable
cost (or "marginal cost", for those economic geeks out there), since the OLPC will be
implemented in large volume.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
It's like quoting the cost of a car over 5 years as "list price + 20k miles / year fuel + servicing etc. etc.".
However, most of the cost over 5 years is "Internet" which is based on "the global average of 20 hours/month of connectivity" (however you have to get it). I can't see that 1 satellite connection per school (once you've got the kit in place and have been using it for a year for $1) is going to cost USD$36.91 or up to USD$56.31 per child.
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.
I'm amazed, dumbfounded, dismayed, and flabbergasted at the resistance OLPC is getting in certain circles. If it isn't someone complaining about the "hidden" costs of the thing, it's people whining that these kids would be better off with food and water or medicine or solving the AIDS problem or, etc, etc. Never-mind that these things are really targeted to the much better off but highly neglected second world and not the far more talked-about third.
And then there's those who try to be all "technical" and say it's too underpowered, too simple, too different, too hard. WTF? Just how spoiled are some of these people? I learned computers on 8-bit hardware connected to a B&W TV with no network, no disk drive, no mouse, and no high-res graphics and even *that* was luxury compared to what some of the older folks out there cut their teeth on. This product is designed to be dropped into a world where computers are rare or, perhaps, nonexistent - which reminds me a lot of my own childhood! I got a computer when I was a kid entirely because my dad liked gadgets. He didn't know what to do with it, and I hadn't been told it had no purpose so I spent years CREATING a reason to use it without any training whatsoever. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything and I expect these kids to take part in a similar journey. Who knows what applications they may come up with? Any serious amount of training or hand-holding is going to rob them of the magic of discovery and achievement and freedom that can only come from having never been told what's impossible.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I don't hate children because I think a social project will fail. Throwing technology or money at a problem rarely solves it. Carefully spending money and implementing technology MAY solve a problem. A First World family can purchase a desktop and an Internet connection for a low cost. If desperate, there are computers with an Internet connection in most libraries. How many people take advantage of MIT's online courses to educate themselves? Certainly there are a few, but is it a majority of the populace? Most people in the first world would rather look up Britney Spears' birthday in Wikipedia than read through some undergraduate math courses. Access is not the same as use. If you can do something, it doesn't mean you will do something.
For most people education is about how much it will add to your weekly paycheck. In order to maintain your skills, you need to use them. In the Third World, there isn't the infrastructure to make use of highly educated people. This means that people with university degrees tend to emigrate to the First World. Hati has an emigration rate of about 90% among those with university degrees.
Considering it has a unique UI, customized OS, unique networking, unusual capacity (memory and storage), and more I'm sure, I'm wondering where users will find compatible applications?
I've posted this question to previous OLPC stories, but nobody has really answered it: Where are the applications for this platform?
is this another MS-based TCO "analysis"? ;)
the 100$ laptop was supposed to run linux, didn't it?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's computer ...
Should I take it that they have no connection whatsoever to OLPC?
Who are they then? Their "People" link has nothing but advertisements.
Do I smell yet another M$ funded "independent study"? It has all the hallmarks, FUD from an unheard of source with a name very close to one you trust. It's no wonder that this story was submitted by an AC and I'm afraid we will be hearing more from them.
The bottom line is that OLPC is going to be cheaper and easier than textbooks, which also have a lot of "training," transportation, fragility and replacement issues and costs. Anyone who can't see that has completely missed the implications of electronic publications ... another Microsoft trait.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I just made up the negative amount. But if you were going to account for all the other stuff, why not account for what these OLPC laptops were designed to do. And if it does work (big IF), by helping to educate the poor and let them help themselves out of poverty, we will potentially save X amount of aid to those countries.
And what makes you think all technical support has to come from the west or the government? A quick learning smart kid could grasp the ins and outs of this laptop in say 6 months, and can start supporting his/her neighbors.. possibly free of charge. Or if he/she does charge for it, you are igniting a potential industry and economic activity that doesn't exist prior to these laptops.
What next, we aren't counting the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing the child during the years he's learning enough language skills to be able to understand the computer training? Give me a break. Does anyone list any of this stuff when they advertize their hardware?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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!
While it's an interesting challenge in a game of Civilization, the reality of it is quite interesting. The people that these, "laptops," are intended for are a lot more like that tribe in 4000 BC. They are more concerned with hunting, fishing, and farming (and in some cases, learning how to do that), and other things like just living. True, a lot of these people have bits and pieces of technology that's been acquired at various times, and some might even have computers. But the vast majority of them wouldn't know the first thing to do with a laptop that's given to them.
Look at the Nigerians, for example. Somehow, they got access to computers and the internet. But their development of other (CivIV calls them "technologies") aspects of their culture, like basic ethics, is pretty far behind the curve. Hence, we get flooded with zillions of 401 scam emails per day! We need to be more aware of what these people's needs are and not necessarily compare them directly to our own. Just because a good percentage of Americans own computers and laptops (and that number isn't even 100%) doesn't mean that people in Africa need them.
... "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?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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/
It is not enough to have just food, clothing, and shelter. The US is full of inner city kids with (too much) food, clothing, shelter, and basic education (such as you get in public schools). Yet they are trapped in a life of despair, with seemingly no way out. Welfare by itself, without motivation and opportunities to make something of yourself, does that to people. "Give a man a fish ..." and all that.
You are correct. Unfortunately, most people can't see the benefit of that in itself. They think you have to have uniform literacy and mass usage right away to have benefits, which is an unnecessary and probably unreachable goal.
A much more likely outcome is that organized training efforts will achieve very little before the money runs out. The first generation of users will be smart kids with free time. They will be eager but clumsy proselytizers, and their efforts will enable a certain level of usage in local schools and governments. That kind of organic growth is inevitably unpredictable and unequal, and it will leave people out. (There are people who would oppose the program on these grounds, but they are exactly the same people who can't imagine that there will be any benefits not doled out directly through official training programs, so no worries.)
The organizations that do this kind of cost assessment (like the one leading to $970/laptop) are corporations and public schools, which depend on command and control and only value results that are uniform and reproducible. The uniform and reproducible results, in my opinion, will be nada, and the program will be declared a failure. Meanwhile, a talented, free-time-having minority will become hackers and amateur sysadmins, and their existence will provide a foundation for future developments that we can't predict.
No, its worse than that. This is more like giving you a cheap used car, then making you pay for the driver's training,gas, insurance,servicing and THE ROADS IT DRIVES ON. You don't think a broadband connection will cost $50 dollars a year? You also don't account for the cost to power the things. If the infrastructure doesn't exist, it will be an enormous cost to install. I don't argue too much against this project because so far its just contributors and other countries wasting money on it. My real concern is that when it falls flat on its face, they'll turn to my tax dollars to bail it out.
... you have a very hard time getting replacement parts [for laptops], compared to a desktop system. You have a very hard time getting someone who knows as much about repairing a laptop, compared to a desktop system
Because desktop systems are common, open, and built on standards, while commercial laptops are proprietary, small-market, and closed.
When you distribute identical laptops, built on an open standard, with parts made in huge volumes, to every child in a computer-starved country, that situation reverses completely.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Which one?
Even if you accept the $970 figure, I think this guy's statement should be better qualified. The laptop only costs $100. What he's saying is that perhaps people are not thinking about the operational cost if the laptop were to actually be used. I think it's a valid question, especially with a laptop like these that's much less useful than your average laptop unless it's connected to a network (no hard drive).
But I think it's a bit disingenuous for him to lump that theoretical cost in with the device itself, especially since the cost will vary dramatically depending on many factors. Not to mention that an $870 operational cost over the life of the computer seems very high, even under the worst of circumstances. Training? These are for kids, and they figure stuff out on their own pretty easily, so I question whether this is significant. Repairs? What's the most a repair could possibly cost? $100! Probably much less for your average repair, unless the laptop is crushed by a truck. Network? Certainly not hundreds of dollars per laptop! So 10X cost seems like a load of FUD to me, but cost of ownership should probably be considered in a realistic light somehow.
carpal tunnel, obesity, diabetes, back problems, eye strain and other conditions that arise from spending large continuous amounts of time at a computer...
To me, I don't love/hate OLPC but questions the cost-effectiveness of the project. Computer+Internet can do a lot, but maybe one PC per 10 child - located in school? It was not very long ago that people here in North America lined-up to use a PC with Internet in public library. Why do we think 1 PC/child is a necessary? Is it because of the cool-ness factor? Also, is there sufficient content on the internet/offline in their child own language?
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
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.
Yes the information ala 'total cost of ownership' is correct. However the article puts forth this info as if these costs were unique to the 100 dollar laptop and wouldn't apply to a 600 dollar laptop. This is equivalent to saying that my car priced on the lot was 4 times the 24,000 I paid for it and goes up in cost annually at the rate of 10,000 dollars a year. (gas, oil, insurance, repairs and taxes)
Given this path of logic the faster, you sell you car the lower the cost. right? The more expensive the car is when you buy it the more money you don't loose by selling it fast. The cost of the laptop is 100 dollars. At no time do I recall them claiming that they would lower the cost of ownership, replacement and or repair. The author of the article needs to go back to school to learn on thing.
Logic no matter how meticulously applied is still false if the opening assumption is wrong.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Nah, that's all part of the plan. The plan to insert deceptively cheap laptops in the hands of millions of children not currently in the market for Internet, training, maintenance or other digital services, because they're busy hunting/gathering (sometimes at the dump), or even running from genocidal militias. But once hooked on the PC/Net, they'll even go without food to consume more digital services. And become available as oursource personnel, once India's educated caste saturates and the "developing" world itself needs to outsource to even cheaper labor.
The Earth's "GPP" (Gross Planetary Product) is about $36T:y in impossible accounting (who would buy all of it from all of us?) With about 6B people. That's average annual productivity of about $6K:y. Since the poorer 50% of humans own only 1% of the world's wealth, though income is not quite as inequitable, the OLPC kids' parents probably make less than $600:y, leaving maybe $100:y to spend on each kid, tops. So needing $1000 to spend on a laptop that will last maybe 5 years means those kids will consume twice as much just with the new toy. So naturally they'll start producing more, according to well established capitalist laws of supply and demand.
That is, if the kids don't eat the laptop first.
--
make install -not war
And it's awesome. I want one. It's got the worst keyboard known to mankind though. But the formfactor is excellent.
The plastic is not cigarette resistant though, that was one of our tests earlier in the pub.
You caught me. I hate children. the next big wave of over population. I look out at the world, and I think "Hmm, What does the world need more of? Rain Forests? No. Whales? No. Pristine Wilderness? No. I know, the world needs a least one more person. Sure I passed 10,000 people on the way to work, but I'm sure what would really help ease the political,economic,and ecological stresses of the modern world would be another person." Maybe if they didn't have kids they couldn't feed those countries wouldn't suck so much. This may sound like flamebait, but really lets apply some supply and demand here and see what more children are really worth.
We are all just people.
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
The people who will be using these laptops have no clue what Linux is or what MS Windows is. Training will be the same for both OSes. I don't want to sound like some conspiracy freak, though I am willing to bet that we will soon see MS trying to justify using MS Windows over Linux on these laptops....
Watch the tech news for the next few weeks. I am sure we will see some MS-Fud about these laptops and how MS Windows would be better on them than Linux.
These laptops were about getting technology in the hands of those who would _never_ have said technology otherwise. It was never about "cost justification" or TCO or any other business buzz-word. If all phases of the rollout were not 100% as planed, it still would be a success because the technology would be in the hands of very poor kids who would not have access to the technology otherwise.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Spend about 30 seconds reading the source of this "news" ( http://www.olpcnews.com/ ) and you'll see this "Wayan" guy takes every opportunity to berate the project.
I so agree with this. Can we get a feature that lets us mark news articles as flamebait, and then a preference which lets us not see any article marked as flamebait more than say 100 times. I think that the volume of stories that show up for me on Slashdot would be cut by 3/4 or so ...
I know Anonymous Reader writes more bullshit, and realitymaster agrees with more bullshit. Nothing new for dimwitted clueless fools. I suspect, they are politicians in training filled with dogmatist (political, religious, corporatist ...) spinning truths [AKA: Creative Lies].
... at the time of your death will you feel you need to do much more for humanity, or will you know that you made a difference for humanity.
... terms that should be used for the OLPC project are Education, Learning, Communicating, Participation, Sharing, Collaborating, Developing, Community .... Humanitarians (Knights of the WoeFolk Continent) maintain failing cultures and help solve the next human disaster. OLPC is a "Self-fare" not welfare 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).
Never forget, "Reality is self-induced hallucination." (%~o) for all dogma-fools.
Welfare/Self-fare in summary
Whether the cost is $100 or $900 or $901... or one in two OLPC products are lost/destroyed, the fact remains, it is far better to do something good for humanity, than stay the obtuse course accepting failures/defeats as successes. Bush-schism and/or corporatism socio-economics is supported by the same legacy species of humans that have ruled the world for over 2K years with lies, terror, and religion. We can advance as a human community with or without them, but we remain in grave peril as long as we follow them. We need a leash-law for these megalomaniacs to keep them all out of politics.
The OLPC folks/foundation are humanitarians looking to provide part of a longterm solution to poverty
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?
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.
[satire on]
Only when you consider that the project is planning to run on child labor (the idea is that kids will be an integral part of the training support and repair system) and that the kids may well be spending more than 40 hours a week using these things does the real cost of this "$100" laptops come through. Any fair-minded person is going to have to cost out all this "free" labor that these kids are providing. And don't tell me that just because these kids live in poorer countries that their labor shouldn't be costed out at 1st world rates. So that means the *real* cost of these laptops is more like $100k per year. $100k per year. $100k per year. OMG!
Or is it that you hate children?
[satire off]
Seriously, while this project has some pretty high hurdles to overcome, I believe they have the right idea.
Create something to think with - make it so that the kids themselves can embrace and extend the things themselves, roll it out aggressively but in stages and keep learning as you go. The only way that it can possibly work is to rely on the kids themselves for much of the work.
While everyone else is spreading FUD about the project, OLPC is going to be learning what's really possible and they're going to open the eyes of a lot of kids to a wider, more interesting world.
These people get the Maker/Hacker ethic - they're worth supporting IMHO.
--Mike Perry Untangling Tolkien
You cannot look at this problem through the eyes of a western businessman. You see a computer, you see a person who does not know how to use it, and as a result you see need for training, user manuals, instructors, etc. It doesn't have to be that way:
I grew up in a communist country in the 70's and early 80's. The only computers we had (by we I mean the public, not the government) were donated to us from the west. Weth very few exceptions they came wit no instructions, no manuals, often with very little software. So we learned how to use them. We figured it out. I know people who learned how to program by reading printouts of programs they found somewhere on a floppy with software that happened to have come with a source, and tried to figure out what the program actually does, without even knowing much English. We did have some manuals and books, mostly old editions, also donated, and we circulated these around. Not everybody was able to do that, but there were plenty of us whe could. And believe me that we would be pretty upset if at that time somebody in the west said: "Don't send them computers, they won't be able to use them without having proper trainig and infrastructure."
AccountKiller
I have repeatedly posted that the emperorer has no clothes: this is a ludicrous project, making up in stupidity what it lacks in arrogance.
That the academic deitys at the MIT media center should presume to tell millions of families around the world what is good for them is unbelievalbe; if the wahabist wackos did this, what would you say ? And it is not even a real laptop, but some educational thing, stripped down without any of the fun (those of you with kids know how well that would go over, but apparently the poor slope/goog/wog kids are supposed to be grateful for whatever crumbs we give them, after all, we all know they aint creative, just good at coding (joke))
the whole thing is stupid: u can go down to your fav store, and buy a quite good laptop for a few hundred bucks.
this means that if anyone out there in india or wherever actually gave a flying f*ck, they could order a million stripped down REAL laptops for ~100 - 200 each.
remember, u saw it here first
"support and connectivity aren't free". Film at 11.
It's Linux, damnit! Pay no attention to renaming attempts by self-aggrandizing blowhards.
EXACTLY - I think that too much is labeled as fud on slashdot, but this CERTAINLY is fud.
...Before we start giving children in third world laptops en masse...They should be fed. Of course it would be great if children in such places had laptops, but there are *FAR* more pressing issues facing the world currently, unfortuinately.
.. any Windows laptop must cost 10's of 1000's of $'s. What, with all the time spent keeping the thing clean, installing spyware blockers, anti-virus software subscriptions et al. Given Windows is the statistical default desktop computing environment, then it is the daily use of Windows that should be considered as our psudeo-economic benchmark in such a simplistic time == money equation. Thus, we can conclude, the OLPC project is in fact money in the bank for millions of kids.
Education is probably the best defense against what you describe. I've seen both sides.
I think you may be guilty of what the grandparent was calling hand waving. As described earlier in the thread, crime is a pyramid. Once you rise above the very base level(s) you will find educated people. Crime is not about education, it is often really simple economics (as in microeconomics, how an individual allocates finite resources, time, money, goods, etc). What is the least expensive way that I can satisfy a need or desire? If the risk of being caught committing a crime is low enough, and/or if the repercussion are minor enough, then a criminal action may be the less expensive route. There is also a component regarding the ability to exercise power, which may be a need/desire itself rather then a means to an end. Of course exercising power comes in both legal and illegal forms. Those who are more frequently able to exercise it on the legal side might have a slightly lower barrier to exercising it on the illegal side.
Education is subservient to the political and economic environments. If you have a disfunctional government or economy you will have educated people engaging in crime. The grandparent was correct, the government and economy have to be fixed first. If you look beyond the small scale that you have observed you will find very well educated populations breaking the law, witness the tail end of the soviet bloc and the aftermath. Also witness Iraq, it had one of the best educated populations for the region and these people were unable to correct a disfunctional government or economy.
Flamebait??? How the hell is this flamebait? What are the mods smoking?
Aside from the mention of racism (and really -- "the most racist thing [you] have ever read"?!? Come, now), I can't see anything remotely flammable here. If I had mod points I'd mod this "insightful", but I'd use my line-item veto on the "racist" bit.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Try ignorance
until they discover all the free porn on the internet.
Initial setup fee of $108.00 is bullshit. You don't expect such an amount even for big corporations when there are thousands of PCs to set up.
According to the article, the annual amount spent on a teacher is $6003. Take care, we are talking about countries where the annual income of teachers is much less than this amount. (I am in a big corporation, and I do not have such a big amount of training budget.)
Internet access is the biggest portion in it. You can't expect Intel access is so expensive when there are a lot of users, and in the following 5 years! USD$56.31 one month for twenty hours: it is ridiculous! For a comparison, in China you can get a 2 Mbps ADSL connection for about $150 a year for unlimited Internet access. If 20 students share this connection, the five-year total amount for each is $37.5, i.e., about 1/14.2 of the amount mentioned in that article.
Simply put, it is FUD.
This sounds like another one of those Gartner TOC lectures. Where it costs a million dollars for every email or some rediculous amount and every "C-Level" executive takes it as Gospel. So they then sign another consulting contract to be fed more drivel
Yes, you just ate a hamburger for $5...
But slaughtering the cow cost $100
Delivering the meat cost $20
The cost of storage was $10
The air you breathed cost $0.01
Transporting away the sewage produced eight hours later cost $0.05
My god, man, it's too expensive to even eat these days!
Jon Camfield went on to say "And don't get me started about Christmas. Every year my family gives me these so-called 'gifts' but the training and running costs are crippling. Last year I spent several hours reading manuals and the electricity isn't free you know. The true cost of last year's presents is approximately $870 so this year I sent an invoice to my wife."
When asked to comment, Mrs Camfield responded "Jon can go f**k himself" as she carried a suitcase and two children into a waiting cab.
Look, think about this for a minute: assuming you got a computer as a kid, did you need training to figure out how it worked? I know I sure didn't! And these kids won't either, even if they've never seen a computer before, and even if they don't speak English. This experiment proves it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I live in a third world country and I totally agree. Most of what I know with computers is due to self-study. For support, I just STFW or RTFM or ask in forums. For the less technical-savvy people, they would just ask their more techie friends. We can't call tech support because most of the software are pirated or open source without included support.
After reading the article, what I concluded was that the "statisticians" who collected, measured, and sampled this data are saying that even though on its face the laptop will cost $100-$200 each for select countries, that external events related to the laptop will make it cost significantly more.
Kudos to those editors for finding out how every product ever made in recorded human history operates.
If you buy a product that requires maintance and care to function, say a laptop (you can pick any one you want), for some amount of money, extra money is always going to have to be spent in order to ensure the upkeep of the product. If it is a company buying laptops in bulk, they are going to have to train their IT department (or at least give them the right information, if my presumption is correct) to make sure that they know how to service those laptops. Individuals buying them have the option to purchase warranty, but for those who do not make this purchase, they will have to spend some money getting it fixed if they really want to use it in the long run. I could go on and on about this: protective gear, accessories, "pretty things," and so forth.
I said before that these costs apply if one really wanted to maintain their laptop for a longer period of time than specified. I would imagine that the governments of the countries involved in the purchase of the OLPC initiative will want to make sure each laptop lasts as long as possible, so extra money will be needed to spend on training, deployment, promotion, etc.
All of the other costs, like internet access and networking, really have nothing to do with the laptop itself. That's an external cost, meaning that the customer has the option to either accept or decline that purchase just like anything else. There's no reason why that should be added to the "real" sum of the laptop.
This site just wants traffic and attention. Or they just want to destroy the credibility of the initiative to unknowing people who have not researched the computer. Of course, individuals that are researching have no part in the decision purchase anyway, since it doesn't quite work like that.
FUD.
"Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them."
This is the sort of half-witted drivel that will always appear.
He'll make his money griping about the people who are actually out changing the world.
This can succeed in the same way the Apple II succeeded. It may not be the lifelong solution, but it breaks a barrier, albeit artificial, and has the basic tools needed for connectivity and collaboration.
Opps, right. OK, I'll start ignoring him right.....NOW.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
All of the extraneous crap that adds on to the cost of using said laptop would be applied no matter what the cost of the hardware was.
If it costs $100 to produce the $100 laptop and it costs $400 to produce a $400 laptop... then if my math is correct... that would be around $300 less expensive... (I don't have a calculator handy right now)... shipping the $100 laptop would probably cost about the same unless it weighs a few tons more than the $400 laptop (I'm lousy with measurements... I'm not sure if the weight of laptops is measured in tons or milliwatts)... so I think the $400 laptop is still more expensive...
Unless you want the $100 laptop in black... that incurs a $1200 service charge and you have to shave your pubes with that option... but on the other hand you get a free printer... so it's still not a total loss.
"Cost" isn't TCO. The OLPC laptop costs $100, just like a MacBook costs $1100, and Ubuntu Linux costs $0.
TCO figures are hard to estimate and hard to compare. For OLPC in particular, it doesn't make sense to calculate training and maintenance costs the way you'd do for a corporate machine; in fact, arguably, training and maintenance costs for those machines are $0 because whatever people need will be provided by the community and volunteers.
Internet connectivity costs are $0 because Internet connectivity isn't needed and there is mesh networking.
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!
Thank you Lisa Hoover AKA Microsoft... We know the thought of millions of children growing up learning about OS products keeps you up at night.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Give me a break. They'll figure it out!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
$972 / 5 years / 365 days = $0.53 / day.
p ?TRKID=20591S10743360&RS_ID=2
For only 53 cents per day you can provide a laptop to a child in need, including training, maintenance, and Internet access.
Compared to this: https://www.children.org/pm_children1b_control.as
Maybe we could get a package deal for $1/day to feed, clothe, school, and laptop a child including 2 emails, a MySpace page, and a substantial contribution to the open source project of your choice. It still seems like a good deal to me.
Wow, that's a whopper. Because according to Eben Moglen:
(Go to 41:54 in the video. Downloadable version also available.)
The rest of his presentation is fantastic, BTW.
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.
Because the 250 GB drives contain identical data. You can't RAID a single drive.
If maintenance is so expensive, sling the whole thing out and buy another for $100.. still way under $970.
Unless these laptops are utter crap I would think most would work quite happily for a reasonably long time anyway.. my cheapo laptop has been running for several years and these days I leave it switched on 24/7 for months at a time (running linux of course ;) )
What training? Give these things to kids, provide some docs to get them started and they will do what kids do with computers - they will figure it out and learn as they go along. I certainly don't recall getting any 'training' on my first computer (zx81!) but I got the hang of it and it was great even without internet. I am of course assuming they can already read, if not then thats not the fault of this 'one laptop per child' program. As for training teachers - if the kids can figure it out, so can any half decent teacher.. or just get the kids to train the teachers.
Net connections are so expensive? I think not. Bring in one decent connection to a village hall or school and run a few nic cables around or use wifi or dialup. Worst case they could use UUCP like the good old days.. the internet existed before broadband although maybe those poor kids would have to do without youtube and myspace.. so its not all bad!
The $100 laptop could be great and open up a world of knowledge and opportunities (not just captcha cracking!) for many. The naysayers should button it and let the OLPC people get on with the job.
This post being rated 5 insightful is an atrocity, simply put.
"Basically, by rooting for this thing to fail is basically saying you hate children."
This line alone is so... incredible. Brimming with self-righteousness, while simultaneously narrow-mindedly stupid. Now, think for a minute: Is really what third world children need in their education a Laptop? Is really what first world children need a laptop?
Where is the serious research that backs up the claim that computers in schools bring the kind of return on investment that will justify the cost?
This is not to say a cheap and rugged third-world laptop is a bad idea. Not at all. But given to students? I'd just like to see some indication it will actually work first.
Senthil
RAID refers to a redundant array of independent disks. The key words here are "redundant" and "independent". Unlike two 250 GB drives, two partitions of a single 500 GB do not contain independent disks, and they don't provide redundancy for the read/write mechanism or electronics of the drive either.
since you can easily pickup new laptops for $400 ish at the local fry's.
Probably because of the "true" cost that estimates costs like a drunken RIAA lawyer estimates the value of songs that no one is buying in the first place.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Why do people keep defining new problems in the old context...
The third world is full of interesting, creative, intelligent people, capable of finding solutions to difficult problems. If it costs too much to hook up to the internet, then create a freenet. Build small self contained solar powered network nodes and nail them to everything in site. Do to the internet what the the world bank is doing with finance in the third world with microloans. Create new more interactive software, that provides the training, and teaches the users how to maintain their machines, then provide tools and resources on a large scale in population centers. Make the $100 computer an interchangeable device, with a removeable identity module, so one can simply exchange a broken unit for a working one for a couple bucks U.S. pop the ID module back in, and it's like you never left the ether. Miracles of technology and economy occur as functions of scale, if you stop arguing for why it can't be done in todays paradigm, and begin asking how it might be done in tomorrow's.
This isn't to say there won't be problems. Tell about any new technology on the planet that didn't come with unique problems. I'm just saying it's a small mind that can't see the possibility of elegant, creative, and even simple solutions.
-- Genda
I'm willing to bet the author's main motivation was sensationalism. Journalists tend to write articles with the goal of getting as many people to read them as possible: that seems to be the definition of success in today's media. Exposing and illuminating truth won't get you near as much attention as criticizing a public figure or organization and "exposing the shocking truth" about it, and often shocking "truths" need to be fabricated.
It's sad and it's selfish, but the author is certainly not the only one that does it. A few years ago I had a friend break his neck diving into a river. All of his friends present said "don't do it: you're crazy." All the local news articles said they dared him to do it.
Some of the projects involved building and staffing a hospital with telemedicine capability, starting a newspaper with real news, building 200 schools, purchasing anti-malaria nets, and others. All were done with private donations, people donating time onsite, academic institutions, corporate donations, donated computers (Apple), Internet support, continual media campaigns, and the like. However it was primarily accomplished through a combination of three key talents of one person (Bernie), which are massive stubbornness, massive heroism, and massive knowhow of how to get things done from a lifetime of experience. The stubbornness comes from focusing on just one thing to accomplish and then doing nothing but that regardless of people giving you new ideas or cynicism, just get the job done. The heroism means putting yourself in the line of fire repeatedly (to the point that he even got a stroke in North Korea from lifting a bag of donated rice). That communicates something to people and is part of why he was able to create a long list of private donors who listen to him. Video and photos of him on site and distributed by the Internet magnified the effect. The knowhow comes from him being an ace journalist and partly from a lifetime of favors he's made to other companies he could call in. The decision to devote your life to "giving something back" is profound enough to sway others. My belief is this sort of devotion is what is driving and making possible these things by Negroponte and others, though I am not myself currently involved.
I would say that on this scale of practicality and effort, the criticism of TFA are like unto a flicked sand grain bouncing off stainless steel armor. For those of you who do not believe it I would also like to provide my own quick reading of "The Bill" of TFA.
First, the costs are all in dollars. They should be what it would really cost in terms of local currency and actual costs of local people doing it. In fact, there should not be any money spent on anything preferably. If they won't provide local people to do the job for free or a minimum wage covered by their company/institution anyway they should just pick other people. They could even just pick teen and college kids, train them, let it count against graduation credits or tuition, heck there are lots of ways including making a local company. The important thing is to absolutely minimize the number of people who actually have to be paid by the organization, and these people must get other locals with the same idea, preferably free. There's a reason why Christian missionaries succeeded too you know, maybe they could go to local churches, etc. Heck make a boy scout merit badge even.
The cost of the laptop, as I understand it $100 and not a cent more. I question the $148 quoted price.
The setup, $108 per laptop is utter bullshit. If anyone with two brain cells is running this thing it is a completely free, automatic or semiautomatic process. Any cost it might incur would be peanuts compared to the cost of the shipping and delivery to the location (maybe that's where the extra $48 comes from above) at any rate it is the same for all laptops in a given country at least, and it should cost $0. Also it should be done by ngo type people locally anyway or maybe some local grads over a month at local grad student pay which must be peanuts compared to grad student pay in the U.S., which is also peanuts.
Training, $27.60/yr or $138/5 yrs. I don't understand this point either. First, all documents ought to be free and part of the initial installation or downloaded free over the net, so no printed docs. Maybe a chalkboard illustration of how to turn the computer on. It should cost nothing to train kids since that is part of their educational
Some people sure are desperate for this project to fail. Since maintenence is done locally the OLPC project will actually boost the local economies. The same with putting in Internet infrastructure. The local telecoms will benefit as will the entire econonmy. What with Microsoft signing memorandums of understanding with so called third world countries why isn't there a similar outcry.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Yea what with the expense and environmental damage caused by tree logging, third world children should be banned from posessing books. And besides their primitive minds couldn't handle sophisticated concepts like us in the civilised world.
was Re:True cost of a book?
davecb5620@gmail.com
$970?
Really? My wife is tutoring, at the moment. She showed a third grader a couple of things on the computer at the library, and the girl was off and running. There's also the kids-tell-kids.
Maintenance? When my son was 15, when I got tired of fighting over who got to be on the computer, we went to a computer fair, and I got the parts for a computer. He'd watched me upgrade mine, and helped some, a few months before; this time, I watched and assisted as *he* put it together. I almost never had to to *anything* for him again - it was *his* system, not a toy his daddy got him. Does anyone here think that there aren't millions of kids around the world who'd do the same for their friends, once they got that "training"?
So, training? Hah! Try and *stop* them. I'm sorry, but the original idea was the cost of the computer, alone, and it's still $100.
mark "Dell 610, $350, eBay"
Thank you for this post. I can only imagine how much more successful the OLPC project will be if the computers *do* come with manuals and on-screen instructions. And if they can successfully connect to the wider Internet, a lot of these concerns should just solve themselves.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Nicholas Negroponte's name is cool.
Latin = pontis
French = pont
Italian = ponte
Spanish = puente
Catalan = pont
Portuguese = ponte
Romanian = punte
English = Bridge
Thus his name breaks down into, Negro-Bridge, an apt name for a man fighting to provide a way to allow third world kids onto the first world communications grid. Cool, huh?
Using names to see the deeper meaning in people works surprisingly well in many examples. (The dumbest and crudest of which, (and it's appropriate that it's crude and dumb), is that George Bush becomes a 'pussy').
But how about this fellow, Jon Camfield, quoted in the article who is raising deliberate FUD with regard to the $100 laptop plan? (What's his problem, anyway?)
Well, let's break down his name and see what we get. . .
Cam + Field
The definition of 'Cam' is, "An eccentric or multiply curved wheel mounted on a rotating shaft, used to produce variable or reciprocating motion in another engaged or contacted part."
So a 'Cam' creates a rotating, variable motion when connected, 'bridged' to another part? Add that concept to the word, 'Field'.
So. . , a Field which is attached to something rotating and variable?
Or perhaps a Field which is not level.
Interesting, eh? One guy is making a bridge while the other opposes level playing fields.
-FL
India?
Do you know where it measures on the corruption charts? The present government is a band of thugs out to sell out the nation and their grandmothers to the highest bidder.
And don't even mention the crime rate. The politicians, police and the mafia (who are synonymous with terrorism) are hand-in-glove. This is the price you pay for four decades of socialism, secularism and identity politics.
The referred laptops will most likely be channelised to the black market and end up as toys for the moneyed class. I agree that their right use can bring about a revolution, but if a black market exists for these computers, and obviously they'll be in high demand, they'll meet the same fate as subsidised rations under the failed Public Distribution System.
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Unfortunately, you don't get it either. There will always be a couple of dedicated hackers who read uncommented printouts, etc. I did when I was a kid too. But most of my friends didn't, and that's the point. You can't justify spending billions of dollars for something that a couple of hardcore geeks will use and the rest will throw in the trash. You have to plan for even those without the intelligence and dedication necessary to do what you did.
Yes, I agree, when I was learning how to use a computer, most of my friends did not bother to do it, then had absolutely no interest in it. Later, when they actually needed to use a computer for something, lot of them came to me or others like me for help. In the end, it was me and others like me who ended up providing the training. When the country eventually emerged from communism and started communicating freely with the west, there was already well established "culture" of computing, and it didn't take a long time for the country to catch up with the "west" as far as computer literacy (whatever that means) goes.
Now would we welcome additional trainig, literature, lesson plans, money or other kind of support? Definitely! Were our effort doomed to failure because of the lack of those? Obviously not.
For a while, after the fall of communism, I worked for a nonprofit where a part of my job was driving with a friend and colleague from town to town, from school to school, in an old decrepit car (it belonged to the friend, the nonprofit we worked for didn't have a car, and neither did I), that made so much noise that every tim we saw the cops we stoped on the side of the road and pretended to study the map, just so we wouldn't get out registration confiscated, and installed and modems for the schools' computers, so that they can connect to a BBS and participate in an international UNESCO project on acid rain. We would certainly be extremely happy if somebody donated money to buy a better car, to establish a real internet connection to the schools, to give us some training literature which we could give to the teachers instead of the flyers we typed on our office computer, printed on an old 9pin dot matrix printer and copied on an old scratched up copy machine. We would be glad to have a new office computer and printer, with some new software. Maybe I wouldn't have to write our own TSR keyboard and screen drivers for our national alphabet (on the other hand, I had somebody telling me years later that they just finished typing their master thesis using that software, so perhaps it was good I had to write it). Eventually, money for most of these things have been found somehow (except the car, last time I heard, the foundation still did not own a car, people who work there still use their own, but at least they all seem to have decent cars now). However, even though we did not have the money for all that at that time, the project was still rather sucessful.
Secondly, and by God I don't know how many times this will have to be repeated: it's not about teaching kids about computers. The computer is a tool for learning. Sure, some will learn how to program. But the majority won't.
I never said they will. I was just arguing that even without official support for training and other stuff, the project still wouldn't have to be a flop. In the project I wrote about above, we had bunch of school that would like to participate, but they didn't have computers. If we had the OLPC hardware, we could have added perhaps some 20 schools to our project.
This is a project for the majority, and if it is to be incorporated into the school curriculum in a meaningful way, saying "the kids will figure out ASM themselves" won't cut it, because it never was about that in the first place.
The way I see it, the laptop is just a tool. It will have to be used differently in different situations. In some places, giving them to the "local geeks" and letting them figure it out may be the best way. In other places (IMHO any deployment in U
AccountKiller
Did you learn how to read from old texts for adults in a foreign language?
:)
;)
Actually, my first English teacher was really a translator (there weren't that many English teachers in my country at that time), and after I learned the basics, she had me translate "The Prince and the Pauper". I was about 10 years old at that time, and I rather liked it.
I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though. I was just arguing against the opinion that the project is doomed to be a flop, just because the laptops will actually need more money than $100.
I wish you good luck, I really hope this project works. And myself, I have lerned that it is good to have supporters, even though they often have no idea what they are talking about.
AccountKiller
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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If lessons from Five Talents can be applied, the OLPC program should *not* distribute the laptops all at once. They should be given to a small number of individuals in widely scattered areas, who can then obtain more laptops for the people they train.
So I guess I keep thinking of young adults. Maybe I agree with you that giving them to children might not be the most effective approach. Definitely needs some pilot programs to see how/whether it works.
Well this is the first time I have said this.
JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW! The OLPC program has been in actual up for grabs for a little over a year as it was announced at the UN in November 2005, Since then there has been a lot of input to the program from all over the world . Many ideas and concepts for programs. Because part of the ingenuity of the design and invention comes from MIT alumni and students. MIT has been in the news as of late showing a greater social concern for the less fortunate around the world in other departments and programs based on the Hands On attitude that: Yes one person or group can make a change for one person or a group. The United Nations(that's the UN for those that did not know) just launched its most recent initiative called: Those who care win! Which if a consortium of sorts developed by some Fortune 500 companies in regards to the issues of world poverty and the future directions of future interventions on the behalf of this condition. As of late there is a change in the third world the hard hitters like Mr. Bono., Mr. Branson,Madonna, Miss Keys, Olympic winners, basketball players and now MIT alumni as well as many others who are already there and on their way. That yes maybe just maybe if enough right ideas can come through for them that maybe one day their terrible plight of extreme poverty , health issues, housing issues, human rights issues, violence issues as well as many other issues including depression, crime,government services like the ones Global fund pulled out of in several nations. If this can bee looked at more in-depth by trying different and new things to bring self respect back to those with very little. Then maybe just maybe their could be brighter day and future. This is going on all over the world. PEOPLE DO CARE! The OLPC program is a part of this new initiative that seems to be spreading like wild flowers every where. Many corporate governance comities in world business are taking the lead in helping and financing many new programs. Including Former US President Bill Clinton's Water Go Round program to make drawing water from wells a fun experience for many that are also children. The OLPC lap top is a little system with big hopes and dreams to be that piece of equipment that can change a life and build a future for those that may not have hope. For many of the worlds little people who right now are dying of AIDS and other hard, some even untreatable aliments all over the world. Many hold on to the one day some day to live long enough to get the laptop for third world kids. In places where there is little hope only suffering this dream of owning their own piece of the real winning world, may be more then they could have hoped to ever achieve in their life time! The OLPC program is moving, but there are issues and concerns that if you can't accept an expression like the one presented here then you would not understand. You would only be hurting the poor children more, being like a Scrooge before he changed his life around. They the children of this hard fate deserve this program more then any one. If it doesn't work out then so be it. They deserve the chance to try to make it work! I have read many of your answers and replies. It is very sad that you feel this way. Asia is also not the answer for any problem you have, to just talk about them as seems is the trend. Don't feel bad that you feel this way. You are misinformed and maybe have not found out enough about the Third World people helping business. No matter what any one may say it is only those that can afford to pay as you said that can sponsor 1 million machines. To those people and sponsors we are speaking to you privately each in our own way and we thank you for taking time to listen. Life is just a chance not a grantee. A OLPC lap top is like a life the same rules. Thank you Hunter OLPC user whip32 Slash dot