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Kids Review the OLPC
A. N. Onymous sends us to OLPCNews for an account of kids' reactions to the OLPC XO, and comments: "My first impression is, it's just like when you give a kid a box of Lego." The video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister replacing a mobo is pretty cool.
My first impression is, it's just like when you give a kid a box of Lego
"These computers sure make a cool fort!"
Just the fact that a couple of young kids can change a mobo in a laptop, something that most adults (or even many of the computer literate) are either unable to do or shy away from doing, is something to be said for this project.
Air is just like fog, but it's not gray.
I have to admit I really like the whole OLPC idea but I'm starting to feel like they are selling out. First they boost the memory (and price) so it will run windows and now we hear that they might use intel processors when last year intel wouldn't give them the time of day. I hope this program is a success and that certain interest (msoft, intel, etc) don't end up dooming it from the start.
These appeared to be well-to-do kids who were very likely to have used computers before. That is not who OLPC is aimed at. It would be much more telling to see tests with kids in poorer nations for whom OLPC is their first PC.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Here comes the job market competition!
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse...
Training third world assembly workers by the back door, eh? Sounds cool. Liberal academics hijacked by CIA sponsored hegemony. I love it! Where can I send a crate of these?
Those kids didn't use proper anti-static safety protocols when replacing that motherboard! At this rate, it's going to be twenty laptops per child!
A 10 year old and an 8 year old disassembling a laptop on their own would be quite an impressive feat. These kids, however, seem to need assistance from the "long arm of the law" every few steps. When will we learn that it's not how rapidly kids are able to do something, but whether or not they succeed in the end on their own?
If these laptops need to have their mobos replaced and it didn't involve an angry wife throwing it into a pool then they are not durable enough for children in obscure African countries. I don't think there's a computer shop with spare motherboards in stock in Ethiopia.
What is the point of the kids being able to replace the motherboard? That's about as bad of a metric of usefulness of a computer as you can get. What if they couldn't at all figure out how to do it? Would that make for a bad OLPC?
What I want to know is whether kids can actually do anything useful/interesting on these laptops.
I wonder if the boards in these laptops will succumb to capacitor plague? how long until this becomes the 6LPC project?
-I only code in BASIC.-
Who chose the soundtrack on that video? It reminds me of a bad cover of a sonic the hedgehog 2 background track.
Soft jazz: neither soft nor jazz.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
This is all well and good, but won't someone PLEASE think of the... oh! Nevermind.
> Aput: "It's a stinking piece of shit!"
I'm not surprised that this one is not in the summary!
I rather have the impression it's not in the article, either... could you be more explicit as to where this quote is from?
Idiots.
If you think about it, 1 first world kid building a laptop for 1 third world kid, in a way, is delicious, poetic, and ironic justice. At least the first world kids have their Wiis, their full powered PCs, their Playstation 2s 3s, and Xboxes. But they could learn about the kids who they're building OLPCs for, their countries, et al.
It'd be just like the stoopid UNICEF collections we used to do as kids, except we'd actually be doing something directly applicable, and learning something in the process, not just rattling a can full of pocket change.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
If you add a capacitor? The tube itself is the capacitor - that's what the DAG coating (the black stuff on the outside) is for. That's why the tube holds a charge - because it's essentially a big leyden jar.
You know, when I think back to my very first tinkerings with electronic devices, I can remember things just like this, disassembling things and re-assembling just for fun.
If I hadn't had occasion to do things like this as a child, my mechanical and computer aptitude would probably be nothing like what it is now. I commend these folks for what they are doing. The fact that there is an adult in the video "helping" doesn't mean anything to me, as I can see the value in this that goes beyond our "television reality challenges" expectations when we read something about a challenge with kids.
The real challenge is that they got two kids to sit still in one place long enough to even take instructions like this and still manage to accomplish the task.
On another note, I'm tempted to buy one of these things for myself, looks like a great platform for DamnSmallLinux.
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
Video footage showed an adult pointing out aspects of the computer as the kids were working on it - so offering some sort of guidance. Not to take away from the fact that the kids did indeed work on the computer, but I think it should be noted.
A cute video but not very scientific evidence that this is transferable to any two children anywhere in the world. For all we know the two kids are complete hackers and spend all their days messing around with lego, meccano, taking things apart and putting them back together again. Might also have highly educated parents working in laptop development labs. Would be very interesting to try this experiment "in the field" - I'm sure something like this must be going on in the testing phase of the computers?
There's plenty of kids right here in America that have yet to touch a computer. The whole mentality of this project is like that of Brangelina or Madonna: run off to Africa to snatch a little black baby away from his family under the pretense of "saving" them, but be sure to drag plenty of press with you. The whole fucking thing smacks of self-righteousness. Why do you think Negroponte was so pissed when Intel kicked OLPC's ass with the Classmate? If his goals were so altruistic, then Negroponte should have been celebrating someone building a better computer at an equivalent price point.
HAHAHAHAHA!
you should start believing now that the commoditization of IT skills has now started to hit a high acceleration point. While the demand for brilliant, computer scientists and engineers will never diminish, simply being able to open a computer up to service it will no longer (if not already) be able to fetch the price it one did.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Putting the original mobo in at the factory is a job reserved for a robot. No reason that a robot can't also replace broken mobos, except that employing people to do this is a form of welfare. Kind of like how state law in Oregon requires that only a gas station attendant can put gas in your car.
Actually, it reminds me of the Reeks 'n Wrecks from "Player Piano." Certain simple, mindless tasks may never be automated because, as we can see by examining the state of Welfare in the US, people without jobs have a hard time staying out of trouble.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The OLPC organization is missing a huge opportunity to bootstrap their efforts by selling these machines to customers in industrialized nations at a premium of double the cost, etc. They would get publicity, kids would get inexpensive and functional machines, and they would raise funds to help the disadvantaged kids around the world.
Task: replacing a motherboard
Skills required: turning a screwdriver, disconnecting cables, reconnecting cables
These are not very mentally or physically challenging tasks for most 10-year olds. I hope you are 10 years old. Otherwise, I would suggest a career path less likely to be taken over by robots.
The AT&T Star (? think that was the name, plastic case, deployed on lots of contracts) was designed for easy servicing. The product manager's young daughter was shown replacing the mobo in it. This was back in the early 90s.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
I know I can't walk into a US Apple store and buy a new motherboard... is something different about the African ones?
Lichtenstein is not viable as a completely independent country, it exists at the sufferance of its neighbours and is essentially a (small) extension of Switzerland. Saudi in its current form is clearly not sustainable and the massive investment in deep well irrigation projects is proof that the regime there is attempting to rectify the problem.
City states are only viable during times of peace or when they can project sufficient power to defend their supply lines. A drop in global food production (which leaves larger nations with no surplus to export), a loss of foreign earnings with which to buy food, or a change in the balance of power (that cuts off food supply lines) will cause a city state to collapse much faster than a nation that has the capability to feed its own people. Look at how quickly the Mediterranean city states declined once they lost their dominance of the seas; a similar period of isolation for England did not have the same effect as (at the time) the English could easily feed themselves.
Please don't take this as an offense, but you seem to have a rather inaccurate idea of how the third world works. Especially if you think you need to teach them basic agriculture, or how a two-stroke engine works. They know that. What they lack is, in no particular order:
1. Money. In the modern world, everything costs money, including getting water for irrigation, spare parts for those tractors, etc. And this is the root of all the evil that follows in this list.
2. An industry to support that agriculture. Just knowing how an internal combustion engine works, doesn't mean that you can just get a hammer and an anvil and make a tractor in a village smithy. Until this problem is solved, their agriculture is a case of either (A) inefficiently doing it by hand, or (B) importing expensive foreign tractors and spare parts, and see #1: that's money they just don't have.
3. A market where they can get that much needed money for their produce. And not just "market" as in selling it in the next city, but some kind of _export_ market, because you can't import much without exporting the equivalent. If you want to import something that costs US Dollars or Euro, you have to first sell something for US Dollars or Euro. Or you can take a loan, but then you're soon back to square one: you have to export something for US Dollars or Euro to pay it back.
But there they compete with the _massively_ subsidized EU and USA agricultural exports. And they lose.
It's as simple as that: if you and I make the same product, but the government subsidizes more than half the price of mine, you _will_ lose. That is their problem.
4. Some source of credit without all sorts of strings attached. A lot of "foreign aid" or "loans" actually come with strings attached, like "you must use that money to buy grain from the USA" or "you must use that money to buy trucks from Germany." (But when they break down, heh, you better have your own money to buy spare parts with.) Unfortunately while that may relieve a famine in the short run, in the long run it also just does even more to bankrupt the local farms and industry respectively.
5. An infrastructure. You can't have a modern agriculture without water pumps for irrigation, roads, silos, fuel pumps for the trucks and tractors, electricity, etc. And that's just infrastructure they don't have. In some cases they don't even have clean water for drinking, much less water for irrigation. And don't have the money to build an infrastructure.
6. In some cases, they don't have competent or honest politicians either. A lot of economies are run into the ground not because they don't know what an engine is, but because they're run by an incompetent, corrupt, kleptocratic clique.
Basically their main problem is that they're too poor, not that some white man has to come and teach them basic agriculture.
It's damn near impossible to start from zero and industrialize by your own efforts any more. It's a vicious circle: as long as you don't have high-tech stuff to export for the big bucks, you can't buy the machine tools and know-how to get even your basic industry started. Raw material and agricultural products are so damn cheap that you simply can't export enough of them to get some serious industrialization going.
Stalin did industrialize the USSR in the 30's... by starving a few million peasants (a lot of them Ukrainians) to death. Literally to death. That was the only way to export enough grain to be able to buy all the machine tools and blueprints he needed to start a serious industry.
Not only that kind of a solution isn't practicable in most countries, the problem just got much worse in the meantime too.
So, anyway, ironically giving them some computer skills may actually do them a hell of a lot more good than trying to teach them basic agriculture (which they already know.) If they can at least work offshore tech support, or assemble computers in a sweatshop, they and their country might even get _some_ dollars out of that. And, who knows, maybe get at least started on building the industry and infrastructure. The agriculture will follow.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The truth about the quality and durability of the OLPC will come out when these kids start posting about it on Slashdot.
I'm widely travelled (for an American :-> ) having spent a good deal of time in Europe, Africa, and Central America. My take (of course, this is just from my personal experience) is that government corruption and an inability to implement the rule of law is behind a lot of the problems non-industrial countries face.
The economic friction caused by having to bribe the city police, the port inspector, and the cargo handlers can make small-scale export unprofitable. Or, if you look at the example of Zimbabwe, government price controls can make it unprofitable to sell basic necessities on the "legal" market. If 20% of your profits are eaten by baksheesh, that's a big problem. Most of those problems were avoided by the U.S. during our transition to an industrial-based economy because of the traditions and culture fostered by the founders.
As an aside, I think that's one of the reasons the U.S. is now having difficulty. The increasing corruption (by both parties and all sides) in government, and the apparent abandonment of the rule of law in favor of celebrity justice and the quid-pro-quo is going to become an increasing drag.
Back on topic, I agree that most folks in non-industrial countries don't need the sort of help that's often implied by slashdotters. One reason that's expected though is that the U.S. media routinely protrays other (non-Euopean) countries as desolate wildrenesses populated by teeming millions living in mud-hit squallor. Considering the many, many Americans whose entire knowledge of the "outside" world comes from National Geographic and appeals for aid to impoverished nations, it's not surprising to see this point of view.
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It wasn't that easy.
Much of England's motivation to expand its colonies _fast_ at that time was precisely overpopulation, and the fact that it was starting to have serious problems feeding its population any more. So in effect, the most successful colonial empire was built by those _least_ able to feed their population. Spain, France and the Dutch (which at the time also included the fertile lands of Belgium, plus the trade power to get all the grain they needed), couldn't compete with the desperation of the English.
The decline of the Mediteranean city states -- assuming you mean the likes of Genoa and Venice, not the Greeks of 1000 BC -- well, it's a more complex issue too. It wasn't that those guys starved or anything, it was that it was an empire built on trade income in the Mediterranean, and the importance of that trade declined sharply once (A) a route around Africa, and (B) America, were discovered.
Those states weren't agriculturally poor by any reckoning. As early as the 11'th century they had urbanization rates of 20% or so, which was a hell of a lot better than the HRE or England. It says that their agriculture was already a lot better than the agriculture of the more northern europe, if it could support that many non-peasants.
But their main income wasn't made with grain, it was made because most trade with India and generally Asia went through the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. All the spices, silk, exotic goods, whatever cost big money at the time, had to go through the Mediterranean, and those Italian states made a fortune out of controlling that trade.
Byzantium too made a killing from being a stop along that road, and eventually even managed to steal silkworms and produce its own silk. Now that made an even bigger killing. The 4'th crusade put the Byzantines on the slope to extinction, but made Venice a lot of money in loot. And it gave them even more control over those trade routes too.
And as long as they had money, they could do pretty much everything they wanted. Hire mercenaries to fight their wars, build fleets to control the sea, or do anything else.
Unfortunately, what came next was that (A) someone found a way to Asia that bypassed the Mediterranean completely, and (B) finding new land in the exact opposite direction. Suddenly controlling the Mediterranean meant jack squat. Losing control of the sea was, by and large, a result of having less money, rather than being a cause of it. When all that profitable trade just evaporated, yeah, they still had food, but suddenly they were just another minor county, no more powerful than, say, a HRE county.
So in a way, the story of those city states, the way I interpret it, has the exact opposite moral: what's important is to have the money, rather than to have the grain.
Or if you want an even better counter-example, look at Poland. For a while in the middle ages it made a killing with its producing lots of grain, and exporting lots of it for big bucks. (Well, big florins, ducats, and the like;) Then by the 1700s, the price of grain was already steadily dropping, and with it declined the wealth and power of Poland too. They still had lots of food for their population, even an excess of it, but that didn't do them that much good any more.
Mind you, I'm generally seeing your point that it's good to have some kind of a safety net. Just saying that history isn't half as simple as that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'll largely agree with your assessment of the situation in the kleptocracies. It is that bad, and worse. Very insightful indeed.
I don't really know if it's just culture, or just the same humans in very different circumstances, though. I'd like to be able to chest-thump and say "we're richer because our culture had better values", but looking around me, I think humans are humans everywhere.
Largely any country's or human group' actions, I think, are dictated by what works well. Whether it's camping in video games, or politics or whatever. If for the same personal short-term effort, action X gets you more rewards than action Y, then most humans will see X as "right".
And as countries and cultures go, ultimately we're all plutocrats, the difference is just who gets to have more money and power. And the culture then is mostly dictated by those. If the way to get into the Roman Senate was to be a latifundiary with hundreds of slaves, then culture just got moulded to extol the virtues of slavery. If in the later Italian city states or the Netherlands the merchants had the most power, the culture just got moulded to praise the virtues of trade above all else. And so on. And kleptocratic cultures just get that way because the way to get to the top is to be a part of the corruption, so people are taught to praise those who are the most successful at it. Etc.
So if a situation produces crooked kleptocrats, IMHO we have to look at why that's the best buck-per-effort there.
At the time when Europe had its industrial revolution, basically being a manufacturer was the fastest way to make money. So those had the economic power, and soon gained political power too. Not all of it went as smoothly as in England. If a crooked aristocrat stood in their way, like was the case on most continental Europe, they had a jolly good revolution. The bloody, old fashioned way. E.g., the 1848 wave of revolts.
At the time when the USA had its industrialization spurt, its imports from continental Europe were blockaded by the British navy fighting Napoleon. So prices for manufactured stuff suddenly went through the roof. Anyone who could manufacture something, could expect disproportionately high profits. It made sense to start a workshop or a factory. Or invest in expanding it, if you had one.
Now look at the kleptocracies that you otherwise describe very well. Their choice there are:
1. Invest in land, go bankrupt because you compete with USA and EU subsidized agriculture. Loser option.
2. Start a primitive factory or workshop, lose again, because your low-tech stuff isn't competitive with first world stuff. Any industry worth mentioning in second and third world countries, is pretty much just the first-world-owned sweatshops using the cheap local labour, not the local entrepreneurship.
3. Open some kind of shop. This seems a hideously popular option in low tech places.
4. Pocket the political bribes from the West, pocket half the bribe disguised as "foreign aid", ask for bribes from the rich first-world companies coming to do business there, etc.
Option 4 is simply the disproportionately more rewarding one, followed by 3 at some distance. And as I was saying, we're all plutocracies, just different people get rich and to the top. In this case it's the option 4 people. And culture gets shaped into justifying their own actions, and encouraging people to do the same.
When Europe or the USA industrialized, option 4 just didn't exist. There was no ultra-rich (comparatively) foreign power that could make you richer than the industrialists and land owners _combined_, if you just pocket their bribes.
And from there, most of the industrial countries chose 2, because that kind of people made it to the top. But some, where agriculture was strong, chose 1. That doesn't mean just Eastern Europe, but historically Belgium proclaimed its independence from the Dutch because its interests were better served by going with option 1, and that kind of people were the richest a
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
or less user-friendly than the CIC XO.
The ability to diagnose and fix computer hardware can be very valuable, actually. Lots of places around the world don't really have any support infrastructure for high-tech electronics. Getting things fixed requires shipping them off to a city, an expensive and time-consuming process. For those who are just visiting these places, or are away from home, needing to send computers away for repair is a serious problem. Even when the hardware is cheap junk (or just cheap, and affordable to replace) it might not be easily possible to replace it, so the ability to get it fixed is essential. In communities like that, OLPC machines would be ideal.
In my experience, computer repair can actually make a decent amount of money in such communities. Sure, I wasn't making much by American standards, but I was still in high school, and by local standards it wouldn't have been a bad income. There was a time when I was getting more requests than I could handle by myself, and I wasn't even advertising... it was all word of mouth. Sure, sometimes it would be an unfixable issue (well, short of something like replacing the mobo, which requires having a replacement handy) and often enough it was software rather than hardware (I could do both, but this discussion seems to be about hardware). My point is that by giving kids an easily disassemblable computer and encouraging them to play with it, they already are learning a useful, marketable skill.
My case is a little different, because my community was that of live-aboard ocean cruisers, people who typically have money and computers but live out of reach of any kind of professional tech support. That said, there are parallels even with them, and I helped a lot of people on shore too... people with electricity, telephones, usually TV, maybe a car, and whose kids can go to school at least through age 16 or so. Those people, and their children, can benefit heavily from cheap computers with Internet connections and easily accessed hardware.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Going by how long it was taking them to take the thing apart, the labour costs would exceed the products cost.
That and it didnt show them trying to put it back together, or maybe they did, and it didnt work.
i have an idea! Let's teach kids how to use an operating system that is NOTHING like the OSes they will use in any possible working/adult life.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!