Slashdot Mirror
1 Million OLPCs Already On Order
alphadogg writes "Quanta Computer has confirmed orders for 1 million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The article goes into some background on the project, and lays out the enthusiastic adoption that the project is seeing overseas. The company estimates they'll ship somewhere between 5 and 10 Million units this year, with 7 countries already signed up to receive units. The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable. Even with the low cost, Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier."
I still want one bad. I want them to sell them to geeks like us. I've thought of a few ideas on that front:
My only hope that I know of right now is a contest to design a game for them in which you can win an OLPC.
I really want one. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it...
Can't wait to see what kind of cool things people do with these little laptops.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
million to one that I get to see a slashdot article that hasnt had any comments yet.....Like winning the lottery
Even with the low cost, Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier.
Has anyone done a cost breakdown of the machine components?
Wizard Needs Food, Badly
You can't be phished if you don't have any money.
You're right. Just think of all those Bank of America accounts waiting to be robbed. Or the PayPal accounts. Or...
I don't think this will be a big problem. I don't think these children would be good phishing targets when relatively rich Americans, Europeans, etc are such easy targets.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Children will start to use the computer and learn. Learn to use the computer, learn to find information to make their world a better place. It's easier to learn with a stomach that's atleast partly filled, I agree with you there...
Don't you think that the reverse would be true? Using OLPC machines to launch phishing attacks?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
You're right, you don't get it.
These laptops aren't for areas where there is mass starvation. It's for areas where people can, generally, feed themselves and get by okay but that's about it. Educating these children with computers so they can get a bit of a leg up on their parents would serve them to help areas in their country that *do* have starving people.
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
In most areas in the world where children are starving and/or are illterate, it has nothing to do with people "not possess[ing] enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools".
If not troll, then flamebait or "insensitive clod" (which is being overly nice) might apply.
Nice try at a troll though.
Very inventive.
I agree, in some countries 130 usd is equivalent to 4 months living cost.
If given to someone under these conditions, it will get traded for something they deem more useful.
Dare I suggest yellow fever or hep vaccinations would be more helpful.
catch a wave and ride till ya hit the beach
People think of "all the starving children" in Africa (and yes, there are many) but neglect to think about all the not-starving-but-not-getting-ahead children in developing countries. The OLPC gamble is to raise up the standard of living that part of the population and hope that trickle-down economics will raise the standard elsewhere. If the OLPC makes education easier (or more compatible with the 21st century), the result might well be a general improvement in standards of living in the developing world.
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
OK, though I find this whole effort of limited usefulness, I'm getting a bit tired of these simple minded retorts. The point of the laptop isn't to give one to a kid living in a tribe that doesn't have electricity and farms and hunts for food. There are millions of kids that sit in that in between area of being in a minimum of a semi developed area (i.e. they have something resembling a centralized school system) whose only exposure to the "outside world" is through Gilligans Island reruns. My issue is that it would still seem to me much more beneficial to apply the money to strengthening other infrastructure (making sure the schools have money and trained teachers, having more tutors to help kids since there is a high probability that their parents are illiterate, building up colleges and universities, helping underlying economic infrastructure of their regions so having an education actually does you some good, etc). The choice isn't between a bag of rice or a laptop.
You think it's a lack of intelligence that makes those conditions so rough? Try reading up on history & politics. Good God man.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
Not many communities are made up exclusively of starving illiterate children.
The kids that are terminally ill and too weak to benefit from a computer usually die sooner rather than later. It is the kids who are doing a little better, merely impoverished and frustrated, who will benefit from the education programs and work choices that computers promise. They'll grow up and make the community more skilled, more healthy and better able to prevent calamities such as war and famine.
Just what I need, more spam from Nigeria...
Now every child, even the poor ones, can have access to the vast porn resources of the internet!
Now every kid can be molested through MySpace.
What age are these targetted at? I honestly feel that, at least here in the US, computers are already too prevelant at the elementary level. Teaching kids computer skills is a noble goal, but IMO, not one they're ready for until, say, grade 9-ish.
What ends up happening is they teach the kid to use a crutch. Instead of practicing arithmetic, they let kids in grade 3 (!) just use calculators. My kids only know the times tables because I *made* them learn it. Flashcards and practice, just like I did (I had a hard time with it too). They already forgive me for it. My son is seen as a "math prodigy", to use his teachers words - and quite frankly (not to denigrate him), his abilities are what I would consider average for his age. He isn't like moved on to precalculus on his own, or anything like that. He can add, subtract, multiply and divide simple numbers in his head. This makes him a prodigy in the modern US education system. ouch.
Repeat for spelling. The school could give a shit. Here's how spelling is taught - "OK KIDS, CLICK SPELL CHECK". They're, there, their, who cares.
Eventually, yes, computer skills become important, fundamental even. I just worry how they're to be used in class, that's all. I sure hope they aren't going to be expected to replace teachers, and I hope budget-strapped schools favor good staff over 100 dollar laptops.
"One Laptop Per Child" just sounds so much like "No Child Left Behind" the mere association makes me raise an eyebrow.
In the long run, though, it could be good for the US, if we can make the rest of the worlds children as stupid and ill-prepared as our own. The question is, how to instill that false sense of entitlement in kids around the world.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I agree, in some countries 130 usd is equivalent to 4 months living cost.
There was once a time in America, not so long ago, when owning any computer meant a poor college kid would have to invest 4 months of living costs.
When you are ambitious to learn, "4 months of living expense" is not that big of a sacrifice.
In light of the opportunities it might open up, many people would see that as money well-spent.
Besides, it's their money! If these people (or governments acting on behalf of these people) want to buy them, who are you to criticize?
Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier.
Can it still be considered Charity if one is making a Profit? Does it count as charity if you're just not making as much profit as you'd like?
Seems to me that they're confused.Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Heh. That ought to boost Linux marketshare considerable.
Though we'll never hear about it from the likes of Gartner and the other so-called market survey companies.
Anyone know what the total number of Windows and/or Mac PC's are out there, worldwide?
My guess that this is for poor villages, not hunter gatherers. Even in some of the poorest villages in the world, there is still at least some literacy. Sometimes it's a suprising amount of literacy. Where my parents come from, the Philippines literacy is 92%. Not bad for one of the poorest countries in the world.
Anyway, I think the most powerful and wonderful possiblity of these devices is having access to the larger world of knowledge that we take for granted on the internet. Even if all they had was Wikipedia, it could radically change their world. Did you know that you can double the egg production output of chickens simply by leaving a light on in a chicken coop? I didn't know that until I read it on the internet. Twice as much food by simply having access to a lightbulb and the knowledge of what to do with it. I'm sure there are millions other useful pieces of information that that could help the lives of people in the developing world.
You're making a false assumption that because some areas of the world do not have the ability to grow enough food or have enough information to make different choices that they're not capable of benefiting.
God damn.
If the profit goes back into the charity to do other work or R&D on a $50 version, then that does not make it any less of a charity.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Actually it is backwards. In the most food rich countries, it is most people that would starve to death rather quickly if they couldn't buy their food as fast food or supermarket. The people that are barely able to feed themselves, are actually feeding themselves by themselves, not buying crap in stores.
I'll buy a stack of these for things like:
-Universal remote
-home automation
-kids games
-nursing room monitor
-Entrance door camera/display/speaker/mic
-Asterisk PBX
-Picture frame for grandma
-etc
"Fix it"
I want one.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
One can do anything with enough patience and a good reference.
Ok, lets forget starving children.... Lets take me for example. I want to raise vege's in my back yard. It's not as simple as walking out back and throwing seeds at the dirt. I have to know how to create nutritious soil. I have to know when to plant what seeds. I have to know how to care for them as they grow. Etc etc etc. I wasn't born with this knowledge. I got it from people around me and a whole lotta good books.
What the OLPC is aiming to give people is access to their neighbors and access to a damn fine set of references.
Now the "starving children" can look up irrigation methodology, planting times, seed info.... They can read about composting and replacing soil nutrients. They can talk to people in other places to get market prices and conditions.
OLPC cannot give them patience, but they can give them a good reference. This will allow them to raise THEMSELVES out of the conditions they are in. Knowledge is power. It's hokey, but true.
-T
Food not lawns!!!
Considering the comments on other Slashdot articles about the OLPC project, I'm sure there are a couple dozen other Slashdotters ready to chime in, but I'll make a try at answering your confusion.
The way I see your misunderstanding here is that you're not seeing the range of development that exists throughout the world. International development efforts that have been going on for the last 60-70 years have produced some results. Here's an example of that range of development: one of the countries who has signed up is Brazil. I don't think I've heard any news lately about starving in Brazil. And for other parts of the world without as many resources as Brazil, the level of development, be it food distribution, levels of employment or availability of education varies greatly depending on what part of that country you might be in.
I'll give an example from Malawi, a country that's been in the news lately because of Madonna. I have been there a couple times and have family and lots of friends there. A child in the lower Shire valley may have parents who are subsistence farmers, be very susceptible to food shortages due to fluctuations in weather and not have a very functional school, or not be able to afford school fees.
However, a child in or around Lilongwe, Blantrye, Limbe or Mulangi may have one or more members of his extended family with a steady job, and enough money to put food on the table and live in a house with clean running water. The child is likely to go to a school Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings, too. Problem is, the education materials are not available to give this child a very good education. There may not be enough books to go around. The books might be poorly written or just too old to have good information in them. The school might not teach certain subjects because the materials are not available. Forget about a library. And, the school certainly doesn't have a computer lab.
This is where the OLPC computers shine. They're text books, research tools, communication and collaboration devices and, a technology education. I think the cost-benefit ratio makes them a good deal. They're not getting air-lifted by the Red Cross to Darfur refugees. But they are something a Minister of Education can put into his budget, along with proper funding for training and maintenance.
I hope this helps put their efforts into perspective.
They should let us subsidize them. I'd be happy to pay $300 for one of those. For each such sale in the U.S. or Europe, someone in the third world would get a machine for free, with profit left over for the middleman.
1. If you can "generally feed yourself" your top priority is not to learn something abstract, but to find food for tomorrow 2. Once every child has a laptop... maybe someone will think of the "OPSPC" project (one power socket per child) 3. WTF is a child going to do with a computer? Write software that predicts weather? Or track a staticstics "there is 30% chance that I'm going to be hungry tomorrow"? I don't get it.
You did it wrong. You left out the important [????] step.
TyZone
Instead of faster, faster, faster, the OLPC is using Moore's Law for cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Currently the OLPC costs about $130 per unit.. if demand keeps up, in 12 months we can expect that to drop to the goal of $100, but then what? That's right, those components which fall under Moore's Law (the ram, the cpu, the flash) will just keep dropping in price.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I would buy one for my son, hes only 10 but, i think it would serve very will for him, its ment to be child like ( anything under 20 ) they would make a good "Computer Toy" for him to play with and have some fun (And cant break as easy as my computers - Damn Spyware...)
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Quanta is building the laptops for OLPC, but that doesn't mean Quanta is a nonprofit. A church pastor can eat at McDonalds without McD's turning nonprofit. Habitat can get building supplies donated, but if they have to buy something from Home Depot, HD doesn't have to write off any profit on it (although giving a discount would be nice).
Frankly, if Quanta wasn't making at least *something* on each, there would be a solid business reason *not* to build them for OLPC.
Umm but what about from child predators??
There will be sickos trying to establish contact with kids over there.
Give a child a loaf of bread, and you feed him for a few days.
Give the child a laptop, and you have fed him for life.
Ridiculous? Consider just some of the profitable ventures you can start with a computer...
- Become a 419 scammer
- Sell shit on ebay for much more than it's worth (and charge $75 shipping)
- Install an smtp daemon and become a spammer
- Write viruses and sell them on the black market
- Start a tech blog, with plenty of advertisements. Search for content on other sites, and get monkeys to post summaries of it. If you have trouble finding articles, dup your own.
I can't believe this guys are so bad at marketing, how can they sell a $130 anything? It's marketing 101 guys: prices must end with 99!
Poor guys, where so unlucky, who would have thought back then that Bush would sunk the dollar with his toy wars? I'd recommend them to switch their pricing to a solid, stable currency which enables them to express their price in the usual x99 format. For example the Euro. According to Saint Google:
130 U.S. dollars = 99.3807813 Euros
I think the OLPC project is making a huge mistake if they don't throw these laptops onto the commercial market, for anyone to buy.
Why? Because of the economies of scale, and extra funds raised. These laptops get cheaper the more you make. If you can sell another hundred thousand of them on the commercial market, produced numbers go up the same. Whatever number you were producing before, these will become cheaper as a result. Perhaps just a little, but when you're aiming for a $100 laptop, everything helps.
Secondly, you can sell them commercially for more, make a profit, and use that profit to give the charity/education part of the project a boost. Others have suggested to double the (commercial) price, and use it to send an extra laptop to developing nations. I think maybe extra funds would be better used for supporting OLPC's already out there, for example by supporting communication infrastructure, software projects targeting the OLPC, or developing new uses/markets for these machines.
And yes, I'd like one too. And not just geeks, I think this would be a perfect tool for grandma's and some percentage of ordinary home PC users. To many people, a PC is still a massive, complex, and intimidating machine. The $100 laptop is smaller, quieter, energy-efficient, likely more secure, and simpler to use. Limited in power/storage, but sufficient for many tasks. Perfect for young kids, to read recipes on in the kitchen, check your e-mail, look up a word for a crossword puzzle, or play a game of Tetris on the train. Why again are these $100 laptops NOT sold to everyone who wants one?
--
I'll have one in semi-transparent purple, with a couple of Gig more flash memory, thanks. Interested to serve as local reseller/support in my area.
I wonder how many child predators can hide in a hidden URL bar?
Have you been outside the US? There are some very poor towns. They have food, but no teachers, no schools, not much to do but sit around. The kids aren't going to starve, but they are also not going to learn anything. That's who these are targeted for. Let the governemnt build some coursework for this and pass them out in the towns.
I don't get it.
That makes me think you haven't traveled much.
Learn to love Alaska
The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable.
Really, this kind of comment is rather meaningless for a product that will ship to countries outside of the US. The rise in relative price from $100 to $130 could just reflect the decline in the $US on International exchange markets.
Three Squirrels
I'd bet a buck that within a month or so of mass deployment of them that clones start hitting the market. And as such, they certainly couldn't charge a whole lot for them either. and maybe they will be easier to upgrade (more RAM and Flash memory, etc, as options). I mean, with millions out there, how are they going to avoid it? There's an obvious good market for something like these things, given all the commentary on every OLPC article here.
I know I'd like to have a low energy usage, built tough, self powered, mesh network enabled laptop thing like they are building, without paying full new laptop prices. Just the self charging aspect is pretty spiffy. I'd just think of it as a good $deal large PDA rather than thinking of it as a full fledged laptop and be done with it. At double their cost @ $260 then, they would be very competitive in the PDA market I think, given a little "adultfying" design tweaks, but keeping the same basic parameters. and ya, that innovative clear screen is one of those reasons..
And for that matter, is this manufacturer Quanta under any obligation to NOT sell variants? I have not read one way or the other on that subject. Maybe if there is enough interest they will offer a near-close clone machine.
If it will keep them from breeding like rabbits, that would be a positive start. Having more than 1-2 kids is irresponsible.
The parent is more of an extreme cynic than a troll and as such, I'll chime in to rebuke.
Ways that computer educated masses will help their more unfortunate brethren:
1. Some societies actually -help- one another if they have the means. I know it may seem like an alien concept, but it does happen.
2. Forget the altruism
If you have a bunch of kids that were never trained in computers during adolescence, they're less likely to develop computer skills that could actually get them employed in the future. Even if they got into the lowest of low end IT jobs, they'd still be making a lot more money than if they hadn't.
Now if some of those kids do end up getting computer literate and end up occupying better jobs than they could previously, a portion of their hard earned cash will flow into the government's coffers. One would hope (though not guaranteed) that this influx of money will be used to benefitting their country as a whole. So even if an individual has no interest at helping someone worse off than themselves, they're still locked into a system of helping them, though indirectly.
The only 'losers' in the whole struggle are those that compete for the same jobs. That of course feeds into the gigantic and very twisted discussion about globalism which I dare not enter without flame protection!
Bye!
The same thing we do every night Pinky, build a million OLPC botnet and try to take over the world!
Think if all the Nigerian children had access to internet, perhaps then we would be oversaturated with 419 scams, and people would get some commonsense.
(I actually do hope they will take advantage of people in the rich world. Sadly I'm guessing almost all of these children are to decent for that)
I haven't seen a single starving bum on the street.
He may have been a bum, but he damn sure wasn't starving. He may have been hungry, but he wasn't starving. He may not have eaten in days, but he wasn't starving. If you saw him on a street in the US, he wasn't starving.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
2. Once every child has a laptop... maybe someone will think of the "OPSPC" project (one power socket per child)
The XO is powered by either a hand-crank or a pull cord. It doesn't need a power socket.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Seriously. This is not a troll.
But it is indistingushable from one. It's the same dumb sh*t question that gets asked on every single OLPC article here. The answer must be in a FAQ somewhere. Now take your downotes like a man.
I agree with the first part of your statement, though I think the second part (the list) is being a bit unfair. Granted, the amount of damage you -could- do with that kind of a mesh network could be pretty widespread, but that doesn't mean it will. First of all, while they have the ability to ad hoc to each other, there is no provided internet connection with them. Most of the places these things are getting shipped to have limited internet access anyways. Second of all, the point of this is project is for education. The target is young kids. If the kids are taught from an early age that these computers are tools for education and productivity they are less likely to use them for less than savory activities. This is a chance for these kids, an opportunity to break out of whatever loop their communities are stuck in and enter the information age, and actually make an impact. I believe, while there will be a few "problem children" here and there, the majority of the kids will realize the monumental opportunity they've been given.
It is not about the starving kids need it or not. It is the politicians want it. See, this provides a good reason to spend the tax payers' money. Unlikly PC, there won't be that many vendors competiting with each other. It is just a lot easier to take good profit on a project like this. And you get good publicity.
Resistance is useless.
Your distinctiveness and your OLPC will be added to our own.
Your life will be lived to service us.
We Are Borg.
Vaccinations - so more of them can die worse later? Most of Africa's problems are caused by uncontrolled medical spending, without providing anything else to in=mprove the conditions/housing/work/factories/farming/whatnot, leading to modern overpopulation in a medieval society.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Distributed Grid Emergency Response:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6364301.stm
They're cheap, take a lot of punishment, automatically form ad-hoc wifi meshes, and can be recharged via hand cranking or solar power. With a firmware add-on and an emergency mode switch they could be used for emergency broadcast, first responder requests, and local disaster coordination.
Toss on a dirt cheap low power cellphone GPS for location awareness, and implement traffic control (and using compressed text messages) to optimize bandwidth. Local meshes which have been separated from the rest of the net can be reattached by airdropping battery powered wifi repeaters into the affected area.
Distribute broadly and you have a highly resilient emergency infrastructure which degrades gracefully.
Computers anywhere don't "reach" everyone, even if many people own a machine. What they do is reach and enable a few, and those few make the difference.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Well, for starters, it's worth $130, which is a pretty substantial amount of food in these countries.
NOOOOOO!!!! Oh, no... please god, no... what have I done to deserve this? How long will we see these ignorant arguments about this subject? And what disappoints me more is to see it on Slashdot. And to make the disappointment even bigger, it was said by somebody with a karma bonus and a low ID.
Mod me troll, flamebait or whatever, I don't care anymore. Burn my karma along with my disappointment. Bye, Slashdot. It was good while it lasted.
So say we all
Is a brilliant plan and a wonderful product.4 338529080
For the "it's better spent on food" argument, please ee this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=423735324
Inform yourselves before commenting, lest you look like fools. The machine is wonderful - it can be restored from ROM, there are servers in schools which back up when they are in range, mesh networking is great. And don't get me started about energy efficiency - there is more innovation in the OLPC machine than the entire IT industry has shown in the last half decade. It's a computer that's tied into the real world and into the education in a very smart way. And I firmly believe that it'll change all our lives.
...943,606 dusty broken laptops
Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people!
Part of the spec appears to be that the right to connect can be recinded, and the laptop disabled, so the incentive to steal one is small. Add that commercial ones (if any) would be a different colour, and it would be obvious that your laptop wasn't kosher, unless you had a direct link with the OLPC.
The OLPC could make things even easier by making sure that helpers got the adult/commercial version, so that there was no ambiguity.
Wikileaks, no DNS
The nations that have OLPC programs now will be the ones that India will outsource its programming needs to in a decade. Like India, having a huge influx of money to its local talent will drive economic and intellectual development.
Just as in the US, there is a huge range of material wealth everywhere in the world. There are a few pits of horrible moral and material deprivation, and there are a few globules of excessive wealth, but, just as in the US, most people live in the in-between.
The OLPC is intended to fit into this in-between. People and their children who have sufficient, but not an excess of, food, and a simple roof over their heads. The OLPC is NOT primarily intended to be used to teach children how to use computers. It is primarily to be used as an extra to, and to some extent a replacement for, good old fashioned printed books, which are, for the target communities, extremely expensive. Your 99 Euro machine is about the same price as the books needed for a child for only a year or two. After that you are saving money.
Exactly what is it about the above that is so difficult to understand?
And yes, I do think that the OLPC should be sold unsupported on ebay, with anything over the basic $130 being counted as a charitable donation. ebay ones should be any colour as long as they're black. Don't worry about support. That would grow organically as needed, and the network wireless mesh would fix the 'last kilometre' internet access problem.
If we improve childhood mortality rates, population *decreases*. The reason is that people want 2-3 kids to survive to have children themselves. If 1 in 6 children survives, you need to have 18 kids to do it. If 1 in 2 survive, you only need 4. That's a 60% improvement in mortality rate bringing eliminating 66.6% of the population.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Seems to me that America has a greater problem with literacy than some developing nations.
We're 12th in providing Broadband access, and frankly, New Orleans looks more impoverished than some third world areas. I think the OLPC program is needed here in the USA, where half the schools have kids who can't read or do math and this is part of Bush's No Child Left Behind program. And yet we call ourselves a first world nation, an economic superpower, and the leader of the free world. And yet, in a small village in some other nation, you'll probably find a greater proportion of educated children. It seems to me that if you visit the rural areas of Arkansas, you'll find nearly the same conditions as some of the poorest regions of any third world nation.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I can see great things the open source community can develop for this machine provided we had access to it, even at a higher price.
They can use the extra money they made to either make more or donate it. Either way, they are donating something to these kids.
1 million on order? But how many have been shipped?
To all the Microshit asstroturfers who have worked so hard to burn this project to the ground...
NYAHHH!!! THE KIDS GET THEIR LINUX ANYWAY! NYAAAAAHHHHH!
That's the beauty of open source: never obsolete. Even after they're old, after the manufacturer stops support and loses interest (or goes out of business), OSS/documented products can be hacked to remain useful. Meanwhile closed systems will indeed wind up in the dump. The OLPC is a very open system and I see it being useful for a long long time simply because a developer or hacker could make it do anything they want.
Is there actually any real educational content for these machines? On the OLPC website there is a rather disorganised wiki with a fair bit of verbiage about constructionist pedagogy, but the only real material I could find was a rather uninspiring draft of an algebra textbook. There's a lot of goodwill about for this project, and many people would be happy to try to contribute, but there doesn't seem to be much of a framework for this: no examples, no coherent roadmap for what is needed or what is already available, and especially no visible input from anyone with direct knowledge of the target schools and communities.
The situation for software seems similar, unfortunately. I downloaded about 200MB of stuff from various sources to set up an OLPC laptop emulator on my XP machine. The emulator is very slow, and the default set of applications seems pretty limited. Again, many people would be happy to write more applications, if they could. But there is a desperate need for better organisation and documentation. It should surely be possible to run Sugar without the whole laptop emulation thing. It would be very useful to have some well-documented examples of Sugar-based applications in some easily visible place. And again, there is no roadmap, no overview of what has been done and what is needed, and no input from anyone with real local knowledge.
I am a big fan of the basic idea of OLPC. But if poor countries end up spending millions on laptops without useful teaching material or software, that will be a terrible waste, especially given the huge resources that OLPC could call upon if they merely asked in a more organised way.
An N800 is maybe better for people who can afford to have other full sized computers.
l
http://www.nokiausa.com/N800/1,9008,feat:1,00.htm
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
All my friends from the countries these are being shipped to are laughing their heads off. What people want there is cash. Offer someone US$100 for a computer, the family takes the cash every time. Imagine if the XO commands US$300 or more. "Sorry little Johnny, but US$300 is more than Daddy makes in a year." OLPC is absolutely kidding themselves that a black market won't revolve once "millions" of these computers start being shipped. It is negligent on their part not to offer these to the First world.
www.itjerk.com
These are geared for second, not third world nations.
Instead of yelling TROLL TROLL TROLL whenever you see a comment you don't like, how about you back up your opinion? Nigeria, for instance, has a per-capita income of somewhere in the range of $300-$400 per year -- a OLPC is going to be worth a third to a half of that. The other countries on the list are in better shape, but not by all that much.
Do you seriously think that governments can distribute millions of these things for free, and that we won't see cases of people trading them for money that they need? Get real. Even if they were being distributed in the US, we would see people selling them to get money for drugs, lots of theft, systematic fraud, and everything else that goes along with government handout programs. In poor countries where the laptop will be worth much more, proportionally, we will see even more of this behavior.
Those who believe that every single one of these laptops will be used for education and appreciated to their full value are living in a fantasy world.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
"I still want one bad. I want them to sell them to geeks like us. "
I give them 30 days from the first delivery to when you'll see them on ebay. Will they be overpriced? You bet, thats a free market baby! People will pay $500 or more just to play with them and sport the forbidden hardware. From what I heard these things are total trash and very poorly made. That coupled with the hard conditions these things will be exposed to I expect to see them in the background as doorstops and boatanchors in "Save the Children" ad slots. Its sad I have to drop a grand to get a decent laptop for my studious child but some 9 year old AIDS infected llama herder in Chad gets these or better yet they get shipped to some Jihadists for car bombs.
This whole OLPC project is deeply flawed. It's too idealistic, and won't survive the first taints of basic human nature.
I've got my popcorn and large 7-Up, and I'm going to sit here and watch the disaster unfold.
Wal-mart does not put all of its profit back into R&D or other products, etc. Much of the profit (probably most) goes to share-holders, etc. Hence, it's a non-profit. Of course, as others have pointed out Quanta is not necessarily claiming to be a charity. It's the OLPC program that's the charity. I have no idea if Quanta actually is a charity, but making a profit on a single item does not mean you're not a non-profit organization. Presumably, the Girl Scouts are also a non-profit, despite their profits from selling cookies.
Something about glass houses and stones might apply here. Humorously, you're not even throwing the stones towards me, as it's hard to pin me down as a liberal - see my pro-life, anti-drug comments on other threads. Granted, I'm no conservative, either. Basically, I think for myself.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?