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Peru Orders 260K OLPCs, Mexico to Get 50K
eldavojohn writes "Perhaps in response to recent news that the lawsuit against the OLPC may be a scam, Peru's government has announced they want 260,000 OLPCs and a Mexican billionaire by the name of Carlos Slim has also asked for 50,000 that he wishes to distribute in Mexico. Things are looking good for the OLPC."
If people had bothered to read the "OLPC Lawsuit-Bringer Has Past Fraud Conviction" (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/03/0526202) article, they would have seen that it mentioned Peru's and Mexico's purchasing plans.
Er...
The article didn't mention Mexico ordering any. Someone ordered them to be distributed in Mexico.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Carlos Slim recently surpassed Bill Gates as the world's richest man. I found it sort of jarring that whoever wrote the summary hadn't seemed to have heard of him.
Carlos Slim is not Mexico, in much the same way as Bill Gates is not the United States.
No, in fact, the whole point of the project from the outset was the main market was going to be direct, bulk sales to governments (specifically, national ministries of education) who would distribute them on a one-per-child basis in their educational systems, the reasoning being that only by selling in that manner would (1) they get big enough orders, and (2) the laptops being fully integrated into the educational system to give the most advantage to students and educators.
I've seen the OLPC and I can assure you that it works.
The OLPC is a (non-profit) response to the need to educate children in developing countries. Intel's Classmate is a (for-profit) response to an inexpensive PC that doesn't use Intel's CPUs. Microsoft's $30 Windows/Office package is a (for-profit) response to a free operating system that is "making the news". Can you see the difference? Neither Intel or Microsoft would have created their responses if OLPC did not exist. Why would they?
Um, a lot of these workers in India are "willing to learn English" because it's their birth tongue.
Its like the #40 first language in India with only a pretty small number of people speaking it first. Its the most popular second language, IIRC, though, with something like a third of billion Indians fluent in it.
The OLPC project requires the laptops to go to children, and become the property of the child. There is also an excellent security system called BitFrost which makes stolen laptops essentially useless.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What is even more amusing is that the keyboard layouts are not even the same!
I mean, they do have similar characters, but this is clearly not this.http://www.donarmstrong.com
Or, ya know, maybe the child will go to school and the teacher will say "where is your laptop?" and the child will say "umm, I lost it" in an attempt not to get their father into trouble for stealing it and selling it, and the teacher will push the "lost laptop" button on the management app and enter the child's mesh identifier and the laptop will brick itself instantly as it is always connected to the mesh.
Just because you don't know something, doesn't give you the right to assume that the worst thing you can imagine is reasonable to expect. It's not like this stuff is hard to find out either. Sheesh.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How did this get modded +5 Informative?
Less than 0.2 percent of Indians have English as their birth tongue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_speaking_world
The vast majority of English-speaking Indians picked it up as their second or third language. I'm Indian and English was the third language that I learnt, when in elementary school.
Sincerely.