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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
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!
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.
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
...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.
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.
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.
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!
... "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
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.
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
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.
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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