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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.
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
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?
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.
That 'plague' has to do with electrolytic capacitors. Please take a look at this image:
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http://wiki.laptop.org/images/1/10/Proto-a-front.
Note the near-absence of electrolytic caps, especially the junky through-hole ones you find on your typical motherboard.
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.
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