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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."
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.
To me, a language learning software package for deployment in Mexico would be the killer app. Mexico should have a leg up on India and China when it comes to importing stuff to the United States. Mexico is much closer and the time difference isn't much if any. Mexico is getting shoved out of nearly all markets however due to their inability to compete. China is shoving them out of the goods market because of their low prices (and associated poor environmental and human practices). India is beating them on call centers because many Indians are willing to learn English and have a chance to do so- something most Mexicans can not or will not.
Mass adoption of English as a second language could give Mexico the enormous economic boost that India has enjoyed in recent years. Can the OLPC fill this gap in Mexican education? Will Mexicans care to learn English? I doubt it. There may soon be a time when large numbers of Indians stop immigrating to the US because there are plenty of good jobs in India. It would be nice to think that Mexico could get to that point too.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
> If people had bothered to read the ... article
This is Slashdot. Not even the editors read the articles. There are only 10 people here who read the articles. First is the submitter and the other is you.
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 $30 Windows/Office package is a (for-profit) response to a free operating system that is "making the news". Can you see the difference? Neither Intel or Microsoft would have created their responses if OLPC did not exist. Why would they?
He's mad about the Classmate PC because making a "low-end, affordable laptop" is most emphatically not the point. The point is to make a tool for learning, which places the emphasis on the software and the collaboration that the system (as a combination of hardware and software) allows.
In other words, he's mad because the Classmate PC is merely an attempt to indoctrinate a new set of kids into the Intel/Microsoft closed-source and commercial hegemony, while his goal is to give the kids a tool they can modify themselves as they see fit.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Incorrect, the submitters always read the articles. If they didn't, then once in a while an accurate summary would arise by pure dumn luck.
At the bottom of the
Except that the OLPC systems run Linux. What are the chances of finding someone at CompUSA who would know anything about them? Might as well take it to 7/11.
And if a computer tech from a major store can't figure out GUI linux, how can we expect it to make inroads into mass market?
I have some hope...if we can incorporate texting into the command line, we may be able to hook an entire generation of kids:
user@ubuntubox:~$ what r u
Description: Ubuntu 6.10
user@ubuntubox:~$ sup
top - 14:36:37 up 39 days, 4:21, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 70 total, 2 running, 68 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu
This server is going down for shutdown NOW!