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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 bet Quanta has.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.