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Dvorak Slams OLPC As 'Naive Fiasco'
theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak has a unique take on the cute One Laptop per Child XO-1, deeming the OLPC project a naive fiasco waiting to unfold that sends an insulting 'let them eat cake' message to the world's poor. When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice, Dvorak votes for the latter. Buy ten OLPCs if it assuages your guilt, says Dvorak, but 'I'll donate my money to hunger relief.'"
We have space, hardware, your rights online, apple, etc...
Can we have a john dvorak section so I have a shot at filtering out all his crap?
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice. Of course there's no reason it can't be both. I think his point is worth thinking on, there are people for whom getting a computer is not much more than some diversion before they die of whatever disease they're slated to die from if they're lucky enough not to die of starvation (or unlucky enough, pick your idealogical slant).
True that no matter how much money you send, it's never going to be enough, but also true, for the lucky ones if they manage to survive their poverty, exposure to something like a computer may offer them a starting point.
He also raises good points... computers are hardly more than advertising pipelines, and unless you're already savvy, it's hard to suppress an rid the experience of the deluge of ads. Also, how many sites are in SiSwati or isiZulu these days?
Heck, I've seen and read of schools investing millions in computers with no tangible results in students' scores, grades, or even elevated interests in learning. The big problem is actually teaching something at all, ever, no matter the tools selected for education.
Yeah, sometimes Dvorak's nothing more than a grumpy old man who rants. I see him in this article as a grumpy old thoughtful and compassionate man. Kudos to him for raising the issue.
Who is Dvorak? The only Dvorak I know is a crippled keyboard.
You know, I was a little nervous about giving them money, but now that I know Dvorak's against it, I'm convinced it was the right thing to do.
Slams Linux in 94 and says that it will never go anywhere ESP. on servers. Says that it will never replace unix (took ray norda to task for letting go of Unix and moving to Linux). IIRC, said that SCO was dead on WRT Linux stealing code from Unix. So on, and so on.
I long ago quit reading him, because he long ago became worthless.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...but above all don't teach them how to fish!
Rice can be stolen and then resold on an international market for money. I was under the impression that XOs could only be used in a certain area or they'd be useless. So the real question is, would you rather give $200 of rice to a dictator that the people will never see, or try and get them a machine that can help spread education and freedom to peoples all over the world?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Give them a fish you feed them for a day, teach them to fish you feed them for a lifetime.
Or at least till global warming kills all the fish.
Is Dvorak just posting stupid comments again so he can get posted on slashdot and improve his readership?
Man does not live by bread alone.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to phish and he will eat for a lifetime.
That's not a unique take, that's the same old tired objections that we've been hearing since the project started.
The XO is not intended to go to children who can't afford food. How dense can some people be?
Oh wait - it's Dvorak, silly question.
Advanced users are users too!
Looks like Dvorak--as many others--are totally missing the point of the OLPC program. It's not for places where people are starving to death. It's for places where kids are able to go to school and get some education. The OLPC program is designed to get kids in developing countries access to technology where they otherwise wouldn't have it.
Not all third-world countries are starving to death. Quite a number have the basic needs covered, but they need effective education, and the OLPC program aims to supplement that education.
While I can understand that John sees the OLPC as a flawed mechanism to alleviate the problems facing the developing world, would it not make much more sense to offer both types of aid? Given that there is an increasing gap between the information haves and have nots, it seems to me that the OLPC project is a good first step in closing the gap. Furthermore, with the increased information awareness, many of the hunger relief mechanisms may quickly be eradicated. As children and communities in the developing world gain access to the combined knowledge of the first world, perhaps it goes a long way to solving the 'Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish' problem...
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
...a free laptop destroys their pc hardware industry. ;-)
... and he will eat for a day. Show him how to monetize his web site with google ads, and he can go to the market and buy fish with the money he makes.
Loose lips lose spit.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. ... provided that child/man doesn't starve.
Teach a man/child that the world is a huge place and anything is possible then something wonderful happens
Hunger certainly is important. HOPE may be more important, for humans.
...but think of all the pr0n that one can find on that series of tubes known as the interwebs.
Teach a man to fish, you're just assuaging your guilt, according to Dvorak.
Feed them for a day or gradually give them the tools to where they can eventually become self-supportive and successful societies? Hmmm.... that's a tough one. Sure there needs to be a whole lot of hunger relief, but without charitable development on industry, education, etc., the third world will never become more than a welfare state dependent on the fickle benevolance of their rich neighbors. OLPC is just as important as hunger relief. OLPC represents an effort to promote education, the most important tool any modern society can have. So OLPC may just be more important than immediate hunger relief in the long run. The way to respect a human being is to help them make themselves able not to make them little more than beggars. Give them food sure, but also teach them how they do better for themselves and be able provide their own food one day.
I got a catholic block.
The cause of the hunger in the first place is the lack of mental feeding. Hungry bellies are just a symptom of the broken society over there. Sure, money can buy rice to feed the hungry kids for a while. They'll still be hungry when that money runs out. People have been throwing food supplies at Africa for generations and Africa is worse off than ever.
As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that working for ya?"
Maybe Dvroak should have a nice big cup of stfu while someone tries something different this time.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I'm sick of reading about him! He's always wrong! It would be illegal to kill him but we can still killfile him, right? I never want to read another Dvorak headline again! Don't feed the trolls!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
After all, can you think of a single project Dvorak has claimed as a failure that didn't succeed spectacularly? His criticism is a strong hint that OLPC is no longer a niche player and is about to make major inroads.
On a more insidious note, Dvorak is an analyst-for-hire. He only comes out with an opinion when somebody pays him to have that opinion. That means one of the big players has decided they want bad PR about OLPC. I wonder if it was Microsoft, Intel, or somebody else?
... and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll feed himself for life.
True I could go out and pay for some food for these folks, as many do. But unless we start investing in in their future they'll just end up dependent on handouts for generations to come. Many organizations are already offering food to the poor but not very many are investing in giving them access to high tech training that could help them get out of poverty. Hopefully OLPC will prove effective in doing just that.
Dvorak needs to head over to ted.com and learn a thing or two.
For example: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria gives a talk on Aid versus trade:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/152
"Piter, too, is dead."
I've heard some dumb shit from this guy before but this breaks the mold. That rant wasn't even worthy of one of the AC trolls around here.
How many times has it been said over and over and over again: the OLPC is not for the starving countries with the distended bellies and flies in the eyes. They are for countries that have generally good health and food but just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students. It would have taken about one freaking minute for him to find that out. Instead he lets us know (again) what an ass he is.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Seriously, it's overpopulation and nature's doing a good job at killing off the shit..
Lets not interfere.
We've been raising money to feed the poor in other countries for decades now, and we're still doing it, so I'm guessing handouts of food aren't the best long term solution (not that I'm saying we should let millions starve and die until we work one out) but this OLPC thing doesn't appear to be taking food from their mouths so maybe in 20 years time we'll be able to outsource all our support to Ethiopia instead of China?
Just tag this 'falsedilemma' and move on.
Is for the richer countries to stop giving them access to easy credit, foreign aid and programs like this. Give them trade opportunities instead. That's the only way you are going to encourage them to create real economies that will alleviate poverty. The obstacles to these people creating wealth and getting themselves out of poverty are a whole hell of a lot more complicated than just access to computers...
If there were a village of people starving, and I could either give them democracy and let them continue to starve to death, or give them rice and let them live under a brutal dictator, I'd choose the rice, too.
The same goes for a herd of cows, except instead of rice, I'd feed them Dvorak's Straw Man.
Then again, they're hungry. I'd feed Dvorak to them, too. Poor cows.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
How about $200 worth of rice and a laptop? Then maybe 20 years from now, Dvorak can hire some of these third world kids to write for his shitty magazine. Lord knows he could use some fresh talent.
FAQs are evil.
Isn't the OLPC supposed to address the root problem that the local individuals have low education and skills and the only skill that they do have (farming) is moot because of a lack of natural resources?
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Dvorak... sigh...
No. Seriously No. They need the laptops. The reason being that the west, in the form of Govt. aid and NGOs, sends rice, clothes and many other basic needs, to the 3rd world already -- and has done so for decades.
It isn't enough. Never is. It isn't enough, not because of scarcity of resources, but mostly because many African governments are corrupt.
Thus, the only good long term solution to this is to try to -- as much as possible -- educate the people of Africa. That way they can better understand their situation and get their dreadful governments out of power, as well as having engineering, logistical, economic, and many other skills necessary to rebuild their countries.
Let's send Dvorak to Africa for extended research into this. (minus the XO or any other laptop please)
Dvorak is shortsighted, thinking that if we can pay for meals for starving kids, that we will stop hunger. That is simply not a sustainable way of thinking about the problem. Take a look at any of the big organizations working on the issue: for example The Hunger Project, or CARE. While it's convenient marketing to associate X dollars with providing Y meals (and they sometimes do this to encourage people to donate), these organizations readily admit that the real path to successfully beating the chronic problem of hunger is to empower locals to be self-sufficient.
There are concrete actions that we can take as members of the "developed" nations, and these include: subsidizing agricultural infrastructure, providing education about health and nutrition, education in general, helping to challenge laws / societal norms that restrict productivity, reducing sexism and racism, etc. But these hunger programs are specifically *not* about providing meals directly.
Chronic world hunger is a real issue (and is different from short-term famine relief, which our military and private organizations do a whole lot of), and there are things we can do to lead to a sustainable solution. Dvorak incorrectly assumes that because we can buy Y meals, we should do that instead of educating the next generation. In fact, the big organizations already tackling hunger know that empowering the locals is the key, and this is entirely consistent with OLPC's goals.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I'm guessing the laptops aren't being given to the starving ones. I have no problem writing them off and focusing on the not about to die crowd from largest net gain perspective, but the idea that giving them laptops is going to turn them into spoiled American college brats is a bit much. I don't know what jobs are available to very poor, incredibly uneducated people, but seeing what educated people in the US end up with, they can't be good.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
True to the linked article, my first thought about the OLPC project was that all it would do is show the have-nots just how much they don't have. I figured it was more likely to spur a violent, lower-class revolution than anything else. I was thinking about 18th century France at the time.
Can you imagine how someone with starving children would feel when they Wikied "Turducken?" It'd be like Marie Antoinette with a megaphone and a team of Solid Gold dancers.
But I also believe that technology is a need, in a technological world, and that it empowers people. I doubt this project can assuage the global poverty and resource distribution fiasco, nor was that the intent, but it may allow a new generation to help themselves.
These laptops can bring them something of value: hope. Hope tastes awful, and it needs salt, which many of the project's beneficiaries can't afford, but it's absolutely better than nothing at all.
I know this is a bit redundant, but I wanted to express Dvorak's point without all the bombast and condemnation. We're sorry you're a guilty white man, John. We're not getting on that bus.
I'm sure the OLPC is a good thing, and I know the people who buy them are doing a good thing, but I often wonder if our priorities are in the right order.
Because Dvorak is ultimately wrong. Technology, in whatever form, will absolutely change the world. I just wonder if it will be for the better.
--
Toro
1. Pick a contentious issue.
2. Pick a side. (doesn't matter which)
3. Pick a fight.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Does it really matter what this old guy says? It isn't said to add anything to the discussion - just said to get suckers all riled up.
Just asking.
By the way, did you know that in some African languages "Dvorak" mean "pompous douchebag"?
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Teach a child to use a computer, he gets to work in a call center for a lifetime.
Seriously though, food aid achieves...? It pretty much ensures poor kids live long enough to breed and make even more poorer kids. You pat yourself on the back for having saved a kid today and create five that starve tomorrow.
Given the choice, I'd rather give those kids a chance at an education so they can raise their standard of life and start trying to ensure their kids, grandkids and every generation afterwards is lifted out of a situation where they need food aid year after year to support too large numbers on poorly cultivated land.
Call me mercenary but, tough as it is, I'd rather a million kids starve while the million that survive improve their quality of life and for the generations to come than save both million now and have ten million starving within a couple of generations.
In this case, Dvorak's self congratulating his short term compassion while creating a far worse long term problem and knocking those who're trying to do the opposite.
A lot of the hunger is because those in power are purposefully starving them, for example if they're part of the tribe not in power and are considered to be a threat to the local dictator. You can send tons of food, and it'll get confiscated to feed his supporters and resold for cash, keeping the dictator in power and maintaining the hunger.
Or in the case of Zimbabwe, you just have a president who instituted various socialist programs and turned what was once the breadbasket of Africa into a nation of starving poor. Getting rid of Mugabe would go more towards solving the hunger problem there than a million tons of grain.
If you don't ask questions, you don't learn
If you do asks questions, some twat will criticise you for asking the wrong person.
$20 says that this story is tagged "troll" etc. just because it's Dvorak.
You know what, folks? He's right. OLPC is one of a long line of pet projects to "help the poor" from people with money and leadership, driven by their own egos and perceptions, not reality.
Witness Oprah's $40M school "for leadership" for African girls; total size of the school is about 150 students. It has two beauty salons, among other things, and has been described as extravagant, even ignoring that it's in the third world. That's a great use of money; meanwhile, a friend of mine spent a month in Ghana teaching kids there, and they didn't have the money for basic materials like pencils for lessons in reading and writing. But hey, 150 girls a year are whisked to a class higher than 90% of the people even in the United States; Oprah gets some pretty photo ops with them, and both the black and feminist communities love her to pieces.
How about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation? Guess what- month-old children in Africa don't die from AIDS; they die from diarrhea because of contaminated drinking water. They don't starve because of AIDS; they starve because they need food. They don't get shot because of AIDS; they get shot because the western world stands by while genocide happens.
They don't need fucking laptops. They need clean water, food, peace, basic health infrastructure, peace, and educational/vocational/agricultural training.
Please help metamoderate.
I sure as hell don't. He's like the Chris Matthews of the computer world. Just another loud mouth. OLPC is a revolution. It isn't naive. It'll take off, but will have many more trials and tribulations ahead of it.
The only reason this story made the grade was to get lots of comments on what a useless columnist Dvorak is. Congrats, Slashdot editors.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Rather than have the various countries of Africa to overfish already stressed ecosystems (an inevitable consequence of fishing, no matter where in the world) it is better to teach how to raise native fishes like the Nile Tilapia (which apparently was the fish that Jesus fed the masses with). Free laptops will advance this goal. Tialipa are like aquatic cockroaches - they breed at 6 months, eat basically anything low on the food chain, and grow very quickly.
I have some criticism here and there of OLPC, and I wonder if it will ever achieve what it hopes to achieve.
That said, I find Dvorak's comments to be horrifically offensive. The ignorance and pretension with which he is critical of OLPC and, by extension, any project that does anything other than ship limited, non renewable resources to countries where it can be stolen by corrupt bureaucrats is frankly disgusting. And the assumptions underneath! That you'll only ever make a one time charitable donation to a third world country in your life! If I didn't know that Dvorak was doing this only to be contrary, I'd say that his rhetoric belied someone who had never deeply considered the problem in third world nations before writing the damn article.
The truth is that third world countries desperately need infrastructure and education. They'll never be able to compete in the world wide industrial market, even if they have natural resources, but given sufficient education they can compete in the world information market. Is Dvorak really so short sighted as to not see that? Kids who grow up with computers can become information workers, and that requires no more infrastructure than a cheap laptop and bandwidth. But apparently that's a long term investment that Dvorak can't see - though I doubt he would be so critical of a similar education initiative in the US, which already has established resources in computer education. How hypocritical.
And there is more - a single laptop can service a large number of children, technology like the XO-1 that could let kids onto the internet can foster a generation supportive and understanding of democracy and free markets without growing up in one. I could go on and on (for example, that the nations themselves are sometimes purchasing these laptops), but I think around here I'd be preaching to the choir.
So, sure, if you're only ever going to spend $200 dollars in charitable donations in your lifetime, spend it on food for starving kids. If you don't mind giving a little more then consider investing in the future of these children, rather than just hemorrhaging money into life support and hoping the situation gets better on its own.
Which is quite understandable, as his professional value stands on how many people he can piss off enough they read his articles and, maybe, click on those banners.
Anyway, this doesn't surprise me a bit.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
the man is an idiot. imagine solving world hunger. boom, for the next 30 years everyone is fed. then they breed. oh, wow, double the problem to solve. why not give them a laptop and hope they can figure out how to feed themselves?
Without food, the kids will starve to death. Name one way that giving them laptops will be of any help.
Increasing food supply within a population tends cause an increase in population, which in turn increases the need for food. Contraception of course would help with the problem, but missionaries in the region are against it of course so we end up with more population growth and more starvation--the missionaries are pretty much to blame for this, despite their good intentions. Combining the provision of food and contraception is really the only responsible thing to do. Also, there is a correlation between education level and reduced population growth rates...If anything the laptops will probably do more good for their society as a whole than the christian missionaries.
We all know Dvorak's a troll. But there are people who are starving (or in need of shelter, medical care, or other basic services). Wouldn't your charitable dollars be best spent helping the very neediest?
Give money for food; they will have more babies.
Give money for computers; they will teach themselves better lives.
Sure, let's buy into Dvorak's false dichotomy and misapprehensions about the would be recipients of the OLPC units - otherwise they might learn to make their way in the modern global economy and feed themselves.
Dvorak is concerned with making controversial statements which he may, or more likely does not, believe.
...is right two times a day. You can't seriously think you're fighting world poverty by providing these kids with laptop.
I'd be willing to extend it a bit further. If you're feeling guilt over your social standing and wish to help out the poor, there is NO need to go as far as Africa. There is not a single country on this planet, barring maybe Lichtenstein or something of similar nature, that does not have a problem with the poor. Americans - I suggest helping the "urban" and the "doun Souf" or Appalachia-inhabitants first.
There's plenty of food in the world. The issue is one of distribution, not lack of ability to grow it. Typically hunger and poverty go hand in hand with war and social inequalities. If you look at the Global Hunger Map (requires Google Earth), you'll see hunger is worst in the Middle East, central Africa, and parts of India. Sending rice or laptops to those places will help little until they can establish safety and equality.
"Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you've fed him for a lifetime." Give people in developing nations the tools they need to learn how to compete in the global economy, and you're doing far better than simply donating food. I'm not saying we should stop donating basic subsistence supplies to these nations, but wouldn't it be better if we could do something to increase their ability to educate themselves and take an affirmative step in charting their own course in future economics?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
If Dvorak says that it is a 'Naive Fiasco', then given how good Dvorak is at predicting the future, the OLPC is in good shape, then.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The point isn't that the world's poor need computers or that they need to be on the internet. The point is that they need better education. Currently a major cost of education is textbooks. The OLPC is intended, in combination with suitable content, to replace printed textbooks. The cost of an OLPC, even at US$188, is less than the cost of printed textbooks a child needs for five years of school. By providing the children with OLPCs, it should be possible to give them a better education while saving money.
Anyone else get the impression that Dvorak won't be giving any charitable contributions at all, rice or not?
The XO is not intended to go to children who can't afford food. How dense can some people be?
Which is exactly the problem; the XO project ignores the people most in need, and for those it doesn't ignore, it hands them a pound of cake instead of a hundred pounds of rice. The guy's talent and resources could have gone to better causes. It's an exaggeration to say "you could buy food with that money", but the continent needs basic literacy, which is achievable with paper, pencils, a schoolroom, and a teacher. It needs agricultural and job skills training, also achievable with basic, inexpensive materials.
Please help metamoderate.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ
He admits that he says crap just to get hits and be famous. His column in PC Magazine is crap and so is his keyboard.
He's a bitter old man who's opinions mean nothing.
Hunger relief is only one part of the problem - it's the old "give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime" thing.
Survival is ultimately a competitive business, among nations as well as individuals. Knowledge and skills are essential in order to produce virtually ANY marketable project in this world's economy, and teaching requires access to that knowledge in the first place. Textbooks are expensive, as are writing materials. Computer skills and an understanding of computers has become incredibly fundamental - to the point, in fact, where basic literacy is taken for granted in the business world.
In cases where there is no social structure and all the power is in military hands, knowledge and skills won't count for much. In many other situations it can make a HUGE difference, and just because there are worse regions of the world doesn't mean we should ignore the ones where people need additional education.
We don't want these people to have to rely on ANYBODY forever - they should be able to build their own society with their own resources eventually. We need to help kickstart the process, but we can't do it for them. To build a non-despotic government people have to invest themselves in the success of a system that is designed to educate and help people rather than grabbing whatever one can for oneself, even at the cost of personal gains that COULD be had by acting selfishly. Once enough people do that selfish actors begin to have difficulty getting more by bypassing the system than attempting to work within it, and for a democracy THAT is the beginning of stability. People need to know that for it to work. Arguably Russia has not reached that point, based on recent news reports - if the system itself were strong the penalties for voting fraud would be strong enough to deter a party (or individuals) from attempting to mess with the system. The US trend towards electronic voting is troubling for similar reasons - it makes accountability for the correct functioning of the system difficult to enforce.
Anyway, the point is that knowledge and understanding should be in as wide supply as possible, and that is the purpose of OLPC. It feeds a different hunger than food, but one in the end that is just as important to the building of a sustainable future.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
For the first time ever, Dvorak got an issue right from start to finish. Not only that, he has shown himself as a decent human being while at it.
I live in one of the countries that will/should/would buy these things. We need better teachers, and a way to keep them willing to work in education. That would solve our problems. Right now we are in a situation where the bad teachers of today breed the worse teachers of tomorrow. Find a solution to that problem and you will end poverty. Give kids laptops and they will only play Tetris until their toys break or get stolen.
The cake is a lie.
They need both to succeed
Africa has cultural, societal, and leadership problems. When you look at the societies that have succeeded and emerged in the modern world, like the western countries, and the Asian countries - it was because these countries built great societies that worked together. They enabled their people to do great things. They became the producers and contributors to the world and to humanity itself.
The problem with food relief, is it doesn't give them a means to escape their poverty. They still remain dependent on the handouts.
The OLPC leaves this problem to other agencies that tries to help feed the poor. The idea is to give a means to help them succeed in the future. To foster in the young minds of children the ability to learn and to produce, and to hope for a better future for themselves and the world they live in.
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for the rest of his life.
Granted, there are probably easier ways to teach the children, but the power of a computer like this allows them to network and communicate with each other. And to build valuable technical skills which can allow them to learn and collaborate.
Or, maybe it will become another fluke. Whatever the case, the African countries need to learn how to stand on their own feet.
The problem is, there's PLENTY of food in the world; there's even plenty of food in AFRICA. The problem is that the people who run the governments there would rather starve their people for political reasons rather than to either feed them or let the people feed themselves. It used to be that enough food to wipe out hunger would rot on African wharves every year; so Americans sent them trucks, as well. The governments stole the trucks, to transport their troops. Rhodesia used to be a net exporter of food; now in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, government thugs burn out the farmers in order to seal their land, and are then surprised that nothing grows there. Marxist African kleptocracies will NEVER be able to feed their people. If Dvorak wants to provide rice for starving African children, he'd better hire mercenaries to deliver it; otherwise, the various governments will steal the food for themselves.
If through something like OLPC we can encourage higher education, even programming (even
Windows!), open up an entirely new market to a skill set, the long term benefit to the economy of those countries is enormous.
I dunno, sometimes he says something useful, I kinda liked his round table television show.
But he's got to say something every week/day/month/whatever, so he just goes with whatever is in the news at that moment.
Guy's gotta eat after all.
I don't understand why this article has attracted so many comments. What Mr. Dvorak points out is completely obvious. So obvious, that there should be no need to post any messages. Apparantly though, there are enough rich, well fed morons in North America who have no clue about the world in general. Supidity, of course, is just a highly contageous disease.
did anyone else notice the interesting timing of this with other OLPC stories?
say for example Microsoft's criticism that olpc won't run Windows?
One of the characteristics of a failed 3rd-world nation is that its people spend money on projects that are not directly related to providing basic necessities. To understand this issue, first look at a highly successful people who transformed themselves from a 3rd-world nation into a 1st-world economic superpower. Consider the case of Japan.
At the end of 1945, Japan was impoverished. Allied forces had bombed it back into barren rock, of which some became radioactive. In the ensuing 35 years, the Japanese people focused on the basics: building the infrastructure (e.g., railroads and public schools), acquiring industrial technology (e.g., transistors from the Americans) to expand its industrial base, etc. Specifically, Tokyo invested almost no money in military forces, space adventures, etc. By 1980, Japan became a 1st-world nation -- and the #2 economic superpower.
Now, consider India. Its people are wasting money on a space race and nuclear weapons. This activity only impoverishes the impoverished people, who are the majority of the Indian population. The result is that the prospects for India are quite poor.
Forget laptops. Forget space ships. Above all, forget nuclear weapons. If you are a citizen of an impoverished nation, focus on the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science (includng agriculture), and free markets. If you can succeed at the basics (and everyone can succeed at the basics), then your nation will naturally prosper.
Look at Japan. In the 1960s, the Japanese watched, without envy, as the Americans "won" the space race. The Japanese knew that their day in space would come, but in 1965, they knew that they must stay focused on the basics. The Japanese succeeded.
Similar comments apply to Eastern Europe. Look at Poland. It does not waste money on either nuclear weapons or space ships. Yet, Poland is succeeding. It will soon become a Western economic superpower alongside Japan.
Unfortunately, most hunger relief programs are simply tax reduction scams. People donate millions of dollars to these 'aid' agencies, who spend 99% on salaries and other fancy stuff, and then deliver a few thousand tons of maize to some harbour in Africa, where it gets dumped on the dock to rot and get eaten by rats.
To deliver real aid, you not only have to deliver 10 Thousand tons of food to a harbour - you have to deliver 10 Million tons of food, plus the trains, trucks, drivers, guards, repair and resupply facilities, tents, generators, building materials, pesticides, drugs, bandages, beds, surgical equipment, doctors, nurses and more, if you wish the relief to be at all effective.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The problem with Dvorak's argument is that "hunger relief" is not the same as "hunger solution". The promise of the OLPC is that in the medium to long term it may encourage actual solutions to hunger, over population, women's rights, etc. It's the old "give a man a fish"/"teach a man to fish" argument. Sure, there's a good chance won't work out in the end, but isn't it worth a try?
In 2006, he was predicting that Apple would drop OSX for Windows. http://www.robhyndman.com/2006/02/25/why-john-c-dvorak-is-wrong-about-apple/
...the idea is still dumb. It may be OK for countries like Argentina or Brazil (which, coincidentally, could buy OLPC laptops without external monetary help), but for most African countries you need books, teachers and schools first, in that order. A laptop is not going to replace any of this. There's just no overcoming this simple fact, even if you hypocritically push African governments to waste money on the project the only true purpose of which is to get you the Nobel Peace Prize.
It has been economically and historically proven that giving aid, no matter in the form of food, technology, or money to Africa has had very mixed results. Some of the time, the intended purpose of feeding and empowering citizens is feasible, but most of the time, dictators and village warlords that are in charge of retaining dialogue with the UN and other aid organizations will add strings to many deals. It certainly can be argued that 1 free laptop per child is an almost utopian vision for education in Africa, but there will always be some who will try to corrupt what is an honest and planned effort by the West. Hell, even the DoD could argue that the laptops could be modified by militas into missile guidance systems, which has been a concern regarding powerful, mobile computers. Bottom line, this could easily fail as much as monetary aid has in recent years. It's a shame that aid to Africa has been capitalized and put on so many agendas so that it becomes a matter of prestige, rather than simple human generosity.
Consider countries like Nigeria for example, that is one of the countries that were considering the OLPC. Nigeria recently cleared out $18 BILLION of debt. The interest they've saved each year for a year alone would pay for a million OLPC's. Nigeria is far from rich, but has enough oil reserves that it can certainly prevent people from starving (whether the political will is there is a separate issue). Nobody should send food aid to Nigeria, because it's not what they need.
On the other hand, even in the areas where famines are rife the OLPC would be more useful than food aid except DURING a famine. A key problem for many farming nations is lack of reliable information that is vital for farmers, such as weather reports as well as information about more effective farming methods, and even prices at the nearby markets to prevent people from literally wasting days carrying goods to markets where demand is low.
Teaching a generation of kids in locations like that how to exploit computers and online resources will long term mean far more than disaster relief, which is what food aid is.
All modern poverty is caused by either poor leadership, or western countries (USA/UK/France) creating poor leadership through manipulation. (eg Sadaam came to power through the CIA).
The manipulation can take the forms of military support for opposition parties they want in power, direct threats (eg in my left hand is $20m, in my right hand is random deaths in you entire family) to existing leaders to implement impoverishing policies, or economic punishment through grossly unfair trade policies.
Food AID does very little for long term benefits. I support AID in the form of micro business (like opportunity international) that teach the community to expand their economy.
A society can only function well when governed well.
The OLPC could be great for second world countries (which is where I think it is intended anyway).
46137
We must feed them, guide their politics, make them "civilized", for obviously, they are not capable on their own. And we had no say in their current situation, we are just innocent observers , trying to "help" them.
It's a sickening point of view, but most seem to hold it, and disguise it in premises that the money is better spent elsewhere. So yes dvorak, while i do agree that there is hypocrisy in many of these actions, and a huge disbalance in wealth in this world, and that people, of all walks, should be doing a lot more... Don't knock those who are doing something ( and the likely scenario is that you knock, but dont do anything yourself ). The just way to solve poverty,starvation, and instability isnt by feeding them and controlling their affairs. It's by giving them the tools and knowledge to correct the wrong, and allow them to rise up with their own ability, which is the same ability present in any human being. Its the way we have done it, its the way they will do it.
I'm not a religious man, but the fish versus fishing thing aptly applies here.
( oh, and btw,, guess why there isnt any of their languages on the web, or any content they can use.. BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT!!! )
But anyways... just the usual "those people" mentality...
There are many places in the world that cannot support their population - Singapore for example - but they are rich. Likewise, agriculture rich nations such as Zimbabwe and North Korea have been turned into starvation areas due solely to thug regimes who value political cronyism above economic productivity. Evil men like Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Il simply steal all aid and divert it their political goals (see also Hugo Chavez and Sadam Hussein).
And that is why OLPC will help more than more rice. The number one enemy of a despotic regime is free information. From the Stazi to Communist China, all collectivist dictatorships seek to censor information and communication. If OLPC someday shines a light on people like Robert Mugabe, it will have done more to reduce poverty than any similarly priced relief or investment package.
The population densities on the African continent are LOWER than in Europe.
And speaking of Europe, their native populations are FALLING. Want to know why? They are using the only effective contraception known - prosperity.
When women can be certain their children will reach adulthood they generally stop after 3 or less. It's when the kids croak in childhood they have 8 or a dozen in the hope some will make it to adulthood.
Antichristian bigot and idiot.
The tools to make African nations self-sufficient already exist - high yield cereal grains and the Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug have already worked miracles on every continent. The technology works in Africa too. The problem is strictly political. One part of the problem is the ill-advised efforts of some factions of the environmental movement who oppose use of modern agriculture in Africa. The other, larger part of the problem is the lack of stable governments who make it impossible to bring these techniques to the farmers in most of Africa.
Once a food surplus exists the rest is almost automatic. Birth rates will plummet because most children will survive. Societies will have surplus labor to put to use in building capital, which inevitably starts the cycle of increased productivity. Desertification will stop as yields increase because less land will need to be cultivated.
It is the greatest failure of the nations of the world today that Africa is still toiling in a dark age.
I love reading Dvorak stories on Slashdot. I never read the linked articles, but the comments are fun.
Give him a sheep. http://store.nexternal.com/shared/StoreFront/default.asp?CS=oxfam&StoreType=BtoC&Count1=660671412&Count2=577811837/
I'm wondering whether the OLPC project makes sure that the working conditions of the company who produces the laptops are fair...
Georg
Guess what would happen if we saved 100 million kids in the impoverished african nations... In a decade 50 million of them would be in the streets chanting "Death to America" Let nature take its course man ... the strong (or lucky) survive the weak perish ... if anything we should be distributing are contraceptives not food.
What a simpleton; a binary, one dimensional thinker. Or more likely, as has been pointed out many times, a low-life baiter.
Dvorak needs to get out more. He'll find that there are huge numbers of impoverished people in the world for whom basic food necessity has been taken care of who will benefit from the OLPC model
Or take this:
Does he actually think that the OLPC will used by children without classrooms, that the educationalists in those countries are completely stupid? Does he think the supply of sites in SiSwati or isiZulu will stay static if the potential readership (demand) in those languages increases? And quoting the literacy rate for an entire population, rather than school children, is insults us, the readers of his nonsense.The most depressing part of this story is that magazine and web-site editors will give space to a tech pundit to pontificate on development and education matters. Couldn't they find an expert that that field?
Give a kid a truckload of rice and fee him for a year. Give a kid a pc with proper education and that kid will be able to feed himself for the rest of his life. Dvorak's comments are short-sighted. Yes, people are hungry and need to be fed. However, the issue is whether you fix the symtoms of the problem [poverty] or the problem itself.
I am all for the XO's and the "...teach a man to fish..." analogy
But the only problem i see is the target of these laptops are not men, but children. So for using the laptop NOW for practical applications ( like organizing others within their community... using the laptop and its wifi/communications features to get more food or water or whatever they need ) is not going to pan out because these kids are just too young. The laptop may need to target +/-15 year olds, that have the intellectual wherewithal.
Fred
Let's all send a truckload of rice... and a truckload of rice... and a truckload of rice... and a...
I don't enjoy being critical but John Dvorak sounds like a chump.
:-)
I automatically donate to the Heifer Project, Quaker Friends Society, and Habitat for Humanity (monthly credit card deductions for 8 years, with requests that they never mail anything to me - that mostly works
So, I also believe that feeding people who are starving takes precedence - obviously.
However, I think that we need to think long term, and I believe that he OLPC project is excellent both in its core idea and in its implementation caveat: I have only run the software under VMWare).
I do think that OLPC threatens Microsoft and other corporations in the PC industry, so I am not surprised that a write fro PC Magazine might dump on OLPC.
He does indeed have a point. What the Africans need is trade and to do that they need a decent infrastructure to move stuff and to do that they need a government which gives a shit.
Deleted
That's right, by spending $399 on a laptop for the Give One, Get One promotion, money that Dvorak would rather have me spend on rice, some child, somewhere will die as a result of my callous disregard for human life. Then again, I'm a pretty nasty person in general, so it won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I would be aiming to increase global misery.
/sarcasm
Though I'm starting to think there is a silver lining to Dvorak's plan. Perhaps the best way to ensure extended suffering in the third world is to keep spoon feeding them rice. That way we can ensure that generation after generation will require handouts! Oh Dvorak, thank you for showing me the way!
By giving food to regions of constant hunger you just postpone the inevitable.
If you truly want to help then the money should be spent on infrastructure and agriculture - people must be able to feed themselves.
Thank you.
I've been working in Africa for a while, and I swear that the Army is the only organization in the US that gets it. "Not a big fan of the army or wars, but the Army is doing more teaching there then any of the other organizations I've gotten to work with.
"George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy."
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:xUBFtJUU2NYJ:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html+prescott+bush&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us
it's always about a little more money, at what cost to the rest of us?
the lights are coming up all over now.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
Can't we just abandon Africa already? We've dumped millions in aid and man-hours of volunteer work. When are we going to cut our losses and let them do it on their own (or not)? Why do we have to help them?
There are people starving in the United States. Our Veterans aren't receiving the care they need. The fastest growing population of homeless people is the group that includes a child. New Orleans STILL hasn't been cleaned up.
Dvorak is right, but he's also wrong - we shouldn't send food to Africa either. We should send nothing. At all.
We have our own problems that aren't getting fixed. Lets fix them before we try to fix other places.
There are millions in Africa who need food, shelter, medicine and protection from "ethnic cleansing" in the very short term (i.e urgently) to save their lives, and as their fellow humans, we owe it to them.
In addition, these people need the educational resources to better themselves and to become self-sustaining and fulfilled in the medium and long terms.
What these people do not need is Isloamofascism, Catholic priests telling them not to use condoms, and evangelical protestant missionaries telling them that the End of the World is just around the corner so don't worry.
What they really need is more practical projects like this giving them a "foot up" on the ladder to joining the rational, secular, educated world. With facts instead of fiction and information at their fingertips, these people can be lifted cheaply and quickly out of poverty and oppression.
Peace and prosperity will be achieved in Africa by technological means, not by warmongers, greedy western corporations (*cough*Microsoft*cough*Nestle*cough*) and religious loonies.
Stick Men
We all know that everyone outside the US lives in mud and straw shacks and need nothing but rice handouts from us. Think of the children!
In all seriousness, the vast majority of children this laptop is aimed at have clothes, electricity and sufficient food to stay reasonably healthy... but generation after generation remain in relative poverty because they don't have access to the educational tools needed to make it in this world. The XO laptop aims at leveling the tables a little bit, that's all.
There is no shortage of critics and nay-sayers in this world who are content to sit back and poo-poo others' efforts. Let Mr. Dvorak contribute half the hours Mr. Negroponte has spent helping the less fortunate and then pontificate to the rest of the world on the subject.
This is not a food/education dichotomy that Dvorak is forwarding in this piece, regardless of what he might want his readers to believe. It's a criticism/education dichotomy.
If John C. Dvorak or anybody else wants to criticise OLPC or any other organism for their efforts to help the less fortunate, let his criticism start with the sentence "I donated my money to hunger relief, thank you.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
He's spouting the typical bleeding heart nonsense. Everyone knows that if you give a child a meal, he'll be dependent on you to feed him forever. Give him a computer however, and he can teach himself how to download pron. I mean teach himself how to grow his own food.
Seriously, the main thing keeping that place in the crapper is an insane refusal to work together to solve their problems. The crops are bad one year so they go to the next village and rape everything that used to be moving before they whacked it with a machete. Feeding them just enough to keep them hungry enough to be grumpy but not hungry enough to really attempt to solve their problems, makes as much sense as giving a society of of rapists aids medication (which is the other big africa "solution" right now).
Feeding them hasn't worked. Education DOES work. This is a fact. Name ONE African country that has been truly helped by throwing cheap rice at them. Name one. That's right, there isn't one. Not a single case where throwing free food has helped a culture take the step towards being a modern society. Education on the other hand... That's where the big payoff is, and it's about damn time someone gives it a shot instead of just trying to make everyone feel guilty for not continuing futile attempts at throwing food at the problem.
There exists different types of aid and governmental and non governmental help. The OLPC is an education project. If you can just think of it that way *first*, then it perhaps makes more sense. Using an innovative low and self powered and rugged kid proof laptop, they are able to deliver a variety of text books and other sorts of educational materials suitable for children at an extremely low cost compared to traditional text books and materials, plus the central server that goes with the laptops is web enabled and the laptops themselves meshnetworking enabled, so one good connection per school or village will help all those people get exposed to modern information of all sorts, weather reports, markets, whatever you-it's a big web out there. In other words, it's a tool Mr. Dvorak. Upgradable as to content. The content is easily shared then. the kids can create their own content as well. Ya know, "human being stuff".
Mr. Dvorak can donate both the ton of rice and the laptop. He could also donate some water filters, innoculations or other medical gear, or open pollinated seeds, or solar panels and DC lighting and radios for night time lighting and some sort of entertainment and news resources, or good steel carpentry and gardening tools, or even a stout diesel tractor and a years fuel if he wants to-all of them qualify as worthy donation targets to help the poorest out there who are trying to make centuries of progress in just years. It's up to him. One sort of donation does nothing to alter any other sort of donation, and having a variety to pick from just makes it *better*.
Dvorak is an idiot. Africa's problems stems from it's cultural problems. For instance, the AIDS virus propogates because for some dumb reason people who have AIDS continue to have sex (forcibily at times) with women making the problem more. Nobody seems to have a civic attitude because everybody used to be tribal. I suppose we all started out this way. (btw, I realize this might be a sweeping generalization and obviously not everyone believes that, but the nature of the problem would not be this large if not a healthy portion (no pun intended) was not engaging in this kind of crap. The african libido is truly phenomenal!
:-) Something for everyone. But seriously, Africa's time is going to come but we need to have programs like this that allow ideas to proliferate through the young due to the fact that the adults don't seem to have gained sufficient wisdom to end the cycle in the various countries.
OLPC comes in because children will be exposed to new ideas (or old ideas) that when they grow up will be able to use and implement on their own. They'll learn the value of education, educate their people and then finally we can start offshoring our IT to Africa instead of the more expensive Asia!
sri
Do people seriously believe that the reason people are starving is because they don't know how to catch fish? Starvation is a distribution problem, not a problem due to lack of skills. These computers are not primarily designed for people who are literally starving to death - there are much bigger problems in those areas than a lack of internet access.
because olpc computers won't feature his keyboard
(please don't lecture me on the actual provenance of the dvorak keyboard, dear humor deprived)
seriously: dvorak is one of the highest level trolls you will ever encounter. if the point is to provoke an emotional reaction, then dvorak reigns supreme. he just completed 50 uninterrupted kills on networked halo, beat the level boss on WoW on his own, and performed a fatality on the collective peace and comfort of the slashdot aficionado's mind. in a way, he is to be admired for this accomplishment. will you look at the frothing at the mouth comments here!? awesome. pure power
look at this panty-twisting fest of outrage and high holy indignation in the comments here. a troll wins by provoking a response. all of those who don't want his articles posted here anymore: stop f***ing responding, then slashdot will stop posting his missives. but if everyone of his articles posted here results in a crapfest of rage and moral outrage, then everyone wins:
1. dvorak wins- more hits to his columns, thus convincing him to troll more
2. slashdot wins- more posts, more traffic, thus convincing them to post more dvorak
3. yes, YOU win- you get off on your masturbatorial sense of outraged superiority in your posts, complete with a warm little glow in the belly of smugness, of having defeated an obvious straw man waved in front of you on a slow moving stick. jokes on you, dear outraged slashdotter
don't want to see a dvorak post on slashdot anymore?
stop reponding. duh
but you respond, in droves, predictably, continually. and so we shall see lots more dvorak
trolls like dvorak, in a way, aren't to blame for the reaction they get. we all are. mindless low iq negativity is nothing new, and will never go away. the large scale RESPONSE to such predictable and pointless negativity is the problem
it's the greatest tragedy of the commons: the dependable useless outrage that pointless negativity always and faithfully achieves. and we, the community, we are the ones to blame for it, not the troll, not dvorak. remember that
you get the story posts you deserve. by your behavior, you deserve dvorak. sorry, but that's just the ironclad truth. same observation applies to paris hilton and britney spears on our teevee, and anywhere else in the media that some skanks provoke mass interest
the first of rule of pr: there's no such thing as bad pr. you honeslty think dvorak would trade in well-thought out reasonable dry articles no one reads for outrageous obvious trolls that everyone goes nuclear in reaction to? it's the SIZE of the reaction that counts, not the EMOTIONAL AFFECT (love it or hate it, doesn't matter, as long as you react at all)
welcome to the way of the troll. only you can innoculate yourself from it. not many here on slashdot apparently are innoculated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not for the third world countries, it's for the countries that have food and water but can't afford technology.
Hi, my name is John Doe, and I want to kill Dvorak. Please help me. I need:
...methods of execution ideas
/. community would contribute
(a) his home address
(b) a round-trip bus ticket
(c) a rental car
(d)
I have a few thoughts of my own for (d), ways to kill him, but I realize others may
have more effective, easier, and generally more desirable contributions for this
category.
Why haven't I killed him yet? Well..it's somewhat inconvenient. Traveling to wherever
he may be would take time and money, then lodging once I'm there. Also, the time
involved stalking him to get an idea of his movement patterns. Then there is the
act itself, which would leave cleanup to be done...(i.e. blood, body, etc). All
combined, those inconveniences keep him safe. So...if the
to any portion of my dream to make it "more convenient", then I can off this asshole
once and for all. No more goddamn Dvorak trash cluttering up my internet.
P.S.: oh and category (e), ways to profit from the execution video footage.
how many times does it have to be said the xo is not for the starving children with flies on their faces ITS FOR THE COMMUNITIES THAT MIGHT HAVE LIKE... POWER, AND SOME BASIC NECESSITIES OR MAYBE EVEN FUCKING MISSISSIPPI YOU IDIOTS ugh people that spread these lies need to die, seriously maybe of starvation
Why not give it back to the people the government stole it from, so they can choose if they want food or a XO laptop... Just saying.
\u262D = \u5350
1. Teach a man how to fish
2. Lend him a crapload of money under the condition that he buys the fishing boat, fishing equipment and fuel from you
3. Wait until man can't pay off the debt due to disastrous interest rates, and invoke the default clauses such as taking ownership of his business, and diverting the fish to a Western market
4. Profit!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Yo white boy!
Go take a stroll around Detroit or any other US inner city.
Black people only became full humans 40 years ago, so get a grip.
Mr Dvorak has obviously never heard the expression "teach a man to fish".
Sure, you can spend $200 and get a short-term benefit for a bunch of people. But when they've finished eating that truckload - what happens next? You have to buy them another truckload then another and another.
What's needed is a way to let these people become self-sufficient.
I imagine a small African village containing 20 teenagers who speak good enlish, are kick-ass programmers with knowledge of the way the outside world works - and web access. I think they can find enough out-sourced work to earn enough for a $200 truck of rice every once in a while.
I imagine a village with land enough to grow coffee - and the net-savvy ability to sell the stuff directly to gormet coffee drinkers at $10 a pound rather than to big business at $0.10 per pound (I bet it's less than that). Their money accumulates in a PayPal account that they use to buy their rice. Sure they have some bad years when the coffee harvest fails - but they have enough cash banked to tide themselves over - and enough basic math and statistics and weather data from the Web to allow them to analyse how often this is going to happen and therefore the amount of storage they need to store their product and keep running the operation over the rough times.
Tribal rug makers can sell their rugs on eBay for hundreds of dollars - they can use the computer to allow customers to upload designs like CafePress does - they can go into the custom rug making business.
Actually - the main thing they can do is to tell me (by replying to this post) exactly why all of my ideas are stupid and how they have much better ones of their own.
This is a MUCH more fulfilling life than sitting out there hoping that Mr Dvorak will send them a truckload of rice sometime in the next month. The OLPC group are attempting a long term fix - the short term problems will still be short term problem for a long way to come - but if just one generation of decently educated, net-savvy kids can emerge from this - the impact will be stunning.
So - you can give a man a fish and he eats for a day - or you can teach a man to fish and he eats forever. But, if he doesn't understand the basics of fish ecology, he probably destroys his local fishery by overfishing it. So if you teach a man to get gainful employment on the world stage, he can buy all the goddamn fish he needs just like you or I do.
www.sjbaker.org
its a nice idea. give a farmer a pen and some paper. he will be so englightened right? his creativity will pour forth and enrich his society. the reality is he needs a new plow so he can feed is %#@^@# family. some in the west don't understand how our wealth was built. go back and look at how old your water/sewer systems are in much of the city, built decades ago and have served generations. its massive water and other infrastructure projects which have raised our standard of living so we can pursue other jobs. trying to skip this step by handing out laptops is just naive and a total waste of money. its fine if you are the one paying for such pet projects, its quite unethical if you try to convince poor governments to foot the bill for your edu toy gadget. its funny how the device already admits its going into areas where there is no electricity with its nonsense hand crank power, and doesn't realize the fundamental absurdity of its position. but i guess the reality is that many tech egos are behind this. and you don't get your name in lights for funding an electricity power station:P look at china. they know what they are doing. massive infrastructure projects to improve the lives of their people. they aren't handing out cheesy laptops to their poor. there are somethings you cannot skip. the record of computers in education is very mixed here in the west. its funny how people ignore how lousy our own children are doing in basic skills when they have plenty of access to computing. it is and was never a magic solution. early on in the 80's-90's remember the schools were so afraid children wouldn't be computer literate they made classes play oregon trail and other nonsense on their apple 2's as if that were actually doing something valuable. apparently the delusion continues.
Invest in "Developing world" or "Global Emerging Markets" mutual funds, OEICs or Unit Trusts.
You make money. They get jobs.
Deleted
I believe the proponents of OLPC see aren't thinking in terms of laptops. They see them as a way to provide education, communication infrastructure, and the basis for participating in the world economy - in other words, a means to achieve what Japan did. Maybe they're wrong. But in today's economy, it's much cheaper to build economic capacity through computers than it is through capital investments in machinery. The same may be true of education and technology. In addition, it's much easier for corrupt governments and companies to control expensive equipment and factories than it is to influence large numbers of (relatively) cheap computers.
Talk to someone in the Peace Corps. Seriously. And no, I am not in the Peace Corps. And yes, I have had this conversation with several who are. Bottom line: The P.C. tries to go in and make a people self sufficient. They try to help them establish a means of commerce, build small business, drill wells, etc. The minute the "Sally Struthers" of the world show up giving away food and life staples, the Peace Corps leaves. You see, the Peace Corps folks and their crazy ideas about helping communities become self-sustaining can't compete with give-aways. You can NOT eat a laptop. You CAN learn with it. Learn to read, write, communicate. Learn about your world, AND the rest of the world that you are completely clueless about. Learn skills and information that would otherwise be completely unobtainable. Is the OLPC going to save the world? Nope, but neither are Sally and the gang. "Teach a man to fish" and whatnot.
I'm sure there is no law against sending an OLPC AND a truck-load of rice. But I'm sure we can get them to build more sneakers on the rice than the laptop.
Hell, what do you know, this little article has actually pissed me off enough to get me contribute. A fair achievement in my long and almost entirely parasitic slashdot relationship.
Before we even start on a response, the eternal question arises: Did he, or did he not donate a single google ad earned cent to hunger relief as he so glibly concludes at the end of his tirade?
Somehow I suspect he smugly punched the submit button on his blog and went back to browsing around looking for more soft targets to lure more indignant ad clickers in with, without a second thought for the starving millions he so crassly claims concern for.
Honestly the man is so clueless as to how the rest of the world that he claims empathy for operates he might as well start writing on the subtle nuances of Mongolian yodelling.
First, kudos for googling iSiswati and isiZulu. I'll be interested to see if his next article that mentions German calls it Deutsche. Honestly, if you going to write in English use the English words. Swazi and Zulu. And had he taken the time actually scroll down the wikipedia page he used for the spelling he may have noticed links to projects concerning translations of software to those exact languages or even, heaven forbid, an online Zulu Newspaper. And er, perhaps if my mates in KwaZulu Natal has a few more of these computer things, they could uh, you know, actual write those "missing" wiki's. Oh wait, hold on THEY DID!
Now, if you will bear with my rant a little longer, for those seething uneducated masses that daily have to choose between mastering MySQl and filling the belly, I think that dear old dozy Dvorak will get a rude surprise if ever he ventures out of his oh so grounded in reality Silicon Valley and met some staving minions.
I know from personal experience that many families that have to choose between food on the tables for themselves and an education for their children, will give both the food and education to their children and suffer in silence themselves in the hope that those children at least can escape the lives that they as parents feel they cannot escape themselves.
How, pray tell, will the expired and rancid grain not fit western tables that Mr Dvorak claims so to be so keen to sponsor, help to create a better life for those children? Seriously, I actually want to know how.
And as for theft, does our dear old correspondent in the land of the free(speech, NOT) even know how little of that relief he is so generously offering to pay for actually makes it to the people who need it after all the officials, leaders, warlords and general low life opportunist have taken their cut.
Good point, of course there will be losses to theft etc. But as he so deftly points out only 13% of the Niger population can read. Last time anyone checked, 100% of them could eat. So if they had to choose between raiding the latest food package or stealing some kids laptop, I don't know about him, but I would rather be protecting the laptops.
fiasco (f-s'k, -ä'sk)
n. pl. fiascoes or fiascos
A complete failure.
Aren't we jumping the gun a little bit there, Johnny?
... or reinvigorates it. OLPCs are built thinking in the future, so think in a future with a lot of people that had a laptop all their childhood, what will they have later?
There is no or little difference between local and "for free" rice, but could be a big difference between the "free" OLPC and what the hardware industry can produce.
Food only fixes the problem temporarily. If they want to get anywhere economically, they'll need to move ahead in technology and education.
#1. make death threats on the public web with your unique id
#2. turn dvorak into a great troll martyr to remembered for the ages and whose words will be recited by children. which, of course, would be the ultimate troll
the point moron, is to never respond, not up the negative response to outright murder. the strength of the troll is directly proportional to the fury of the response. you've just made him win more, by bein gmore furious. DON'T RESPOND. get it?
you fail, miserably
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
this is the type of person i hate the most in those matters :
some people band together, try to do a charity, they put effort to it and realize it.
then some shitbags come up and say "hey, this is not something on top of the need list. you had better to >this
you know shitbag, those people actually banded together, and made an effort to fix matters for a change.
WHAT the f@ck did you yourself do ? other than "dont do that, do something else" blabber while sitting pretty in your office chair ?
WHY are you talking against some people who actually DID something, and not doing something on the matter you have spoken yourself ?
Read radical news here
Like tractors, fertilizers, clean water, and a way to provide a work force with jobs so that the economy can thrive.
People starving is not really about a lack of food. It's a failure of the economy and infrastructure to create and deliver the food to the people that need it. If you just send people food and think you're done, then you are just putting a short term patch on a long term problem.
Obviously you need to feed people in the short term, and providing aid in the traditional way makes a lot of sense. But where do you go after that? Educate the children so they can pull the economy up into the information age or at least the industrial revolution? Maybe give people access to micro-loans so they can get the small capital they need to start or continue a business. (a micro-loans are small loans that would enable some to buy an axe and a wheelbarrow for example)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Isn't it funny the way an article like this comes out, just as msft and intell get all pissy about the XO?
Is it possible that this is just msft using any means possible to slow the spread of linux - or anything non-msft?
Use Lewis Black or George Carlin voice in yer head when you read Dvorak.
You know what? One of those African kids can take his or her OLPC unit and use to set up a donations website, with some interesting interesting pictures about his/her life, them (also with the same OLPC laptop) the very same kid could set up a paypal account to get the donations, and after all of this, this kid can come to this thread and put a link to this website. All of that in less than a day! I bet this kid will get a lot more donation money with this than if he/she would rely on Dvorak-like donations. I know this little story is silly and has a lot of drawbacks, but I just showed it to point out that technology (Internet/computers in special) has infinitely many ways to help people change their lives. Giving food is only a way of (barely) keeping life going. If I were this kid I was talking about, I sure would rather having the laptop and so I could set up my paypal donations site pronto.
Slashdot degrades itself when it runs stories by Dvorak. It can't look good from any perspective when half the regular membership is tagging a story submission as troll. I'll show you how it works. Watch me degrade myself by making references to Woody Allen. In fact, I did watch Sleeper the other night. (An interesting calculation: when Allen wakes up in the year 2173, Soon-Yi will be 203 years old. Gaaa! Given enough time, he'll prove us wrong yet.) Dvorak is the Howard Cosell of the IT industry, and that's probably paying him a complement he doesn't deserve.
doesn't that officially make it a success?
Priorities are not in line, these people first need better schools, teachers, clean water food etc. Many will like the"toy: laptop, maybe a very small percent will learn some skills (programming) but I think the money could be used better, ie Dafur. People are starving and were giving out cheap laptops, it's going to be hard to also supply free Internet. The project has the best of intentions and Mr. Negroponte[sp?] is doing something respectable but, prioritize. This should come later, but that money towards books that can be re-used forever, or to make living conditions better. Some countries like Mexico maybe I can see this working, but poor African kids? You can hope that it will open their minds up to unlimited information but, ..seriously you guys...
How is a truck load of rice better than an OLPC? Just giving food aid to the starving is like giving heroine to an addict. You satisfy the immediate need- but you just continue the dependence. While it's valid to argue that hunger and crushing poverty are more immediate problems than the lack of computers for school children; Dvorak doesn't offer any better ideas. Hey let's just give more money to the often abused aid agencies rather than work towards solving the problems. At least the OLPC project is an attempt at addressing some of the root causes of poverty by giving people access to information and education- people who otherwise would not have it. Does anyone seriously think that it's THE solution to the problem? Of course it's not; but it's in better spirit than simply giving food aid. Were Dvorak calling for a program like this to be accompanied by works projects, farming-education, economic developement programs, anti-corruption efforts, etc. then he'd come across as more of a humanitarian. Instead, he comes across as the kind of ass who complains when someone discusses treating mental illness among homeless people because you could feed a dozen homeless on the money you'd pay to treat and counsel one. Before I get flamed, I know that not all homeless people are homeless because of mental illness- but many are and treatment is often unavailable. Anyways, screw Dvorak and his "give a man a fish" attitude.
Being on slashdot I should not be surprised.
But it seems to me that many comment (and of course the article) are missing the point.
It is not only about teaching some IT skills to un educated children.
If OLPC succeeds (and even if I'm not optimistic, I certainly hope it will), those children will have access to renewable information, school manuals (which are very hard to get to them now, exepensive, seldomly up to date, and fragile) and a communication mean.
The implications are quite revolutionary, and even threatening for many governements.
OLPC is not about teaching programming, it is about setting up an information infrastructure.
The potential of progress if this succeeds is so enormous that I think it may be the greatest threat for the project.
Fanatically open and non-commercial computers are the polar opposite of an "advertising delivery mechanism".
Furthermore, exactly what products and services does he think the evil Mr. Negroponte is planning on advertising to these impoverished children? Let's give these kids these little green computers. That will do it! That will solve the poverty problem and everything else, for that matter. How stupid do I look to you Dvorak?
Obviously nobody said anything like that. This is a very ham-handed attempt at creating a straw man argument to destroy.
*sigh*
Dvorak's argument seems to be that while so many people are going hungry we should not be working on education.
Dvorak is not the first one to use this argument.
My response could be a detailed explanation of how and why we aught to attack the problem at every level (from emergency food drops to fair trade and university education scholarships). However I am feeling a bit emotional about the issue so instead I offer this rebuttal:
I'm not a fucking farmer dipshit!
I'm a programmer. I can show people how to access information, how to process it and how to make tools and ultimately wield the power of knowledge to their own advantage.
If you don't think that these skills are of any use to poor people I would really like to know your reasoning.
p.s. Did you think that people are starving because of a lack of money for food aid?
Read up on the subject a bit before you go pontificating.
We've tried giving boat loads of rice for years. Why not give them some technology? Frankly, its a similar problem to what we've debated in the US for years: Give them food or give them the means to obtain their own wealth.
my concern for the program is that we are dumping technology that coupld be used very dangerously if there is no one there to provide guidance and regulation. Lets put 2 points together... first, parts of africa are breeding grounds and safe havens for people who purportrate fraud by internet, seccondly throwing wifi enabled laptops to children living near those areas is asking them to make trouble... do you see the financial train wreak we could be getting ourselves into? this whole one laptop per child idea came from the Technology Entertainment and Design convention last year where the rich and powerful "grant a wish" of a fellow T.E.D fatcat. i know that they have noble and good intentions with their wish, but if i had a i wish, i would wish that people wouldnt just do something because they can and let this innappropriate idea die untill better conditions prevail. i also slam the OLPC program as naive. any others who see the danger of this program please organize and make our voices heard. please reply.
Washington
The US Army will abandon depleted uranium, instead opting to use John C. Dvorak's pressed nail clippings as the new antitank weapon of choice. This change in policy followed a study that proved Dvorak to be the densest object on Earth, surpassing DU by at least an order of magnitude.
This amazing property of his stems from the fact that his brain seems to be a lump of pure neutronium, a material previously thought not to exist in our solar system. In order to sustain the ultra-massive brain, the rest of the body has dramatically inreased density, as well.
"We plucked some of his eyebrow hairs and used them in flechette rounds," said General J. Random Soldier during a press conference held Friday. "They punched through two inches of reinforced steel like butter."
"This is pretty amazing," added scientist Foobar Quux, who conducted the study on Dvorak's unique physique "I mean, how does he think with that brain at all?"
In order to produce the massive amounts of nail clippings required by the USA Army, Dvorak has been put on special medication intended to accelerate nail growth. Even though the drugs are known to have debilitating side effects including the loss of all higher brain functions, Army scientists have not been able to detect any difference in Dvorak's behavior.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
it's a certain success!
It's that simple. Teach them to be self sustaining. Look at what happened to Zimbabwe (Zaire maybe?), when the blacks took control of the country, they kicked out all the white farmers to give the land to blacks to farm the land instead, and guess what happened. All of the super successful farming operations the whites had in place went to shit cause these people have no fucking clue how to manage anything. You can't expect an entire continent of people to go from the stone age to the near industrial age when they were first encountered by europeans and colonization occurred. They skipped so many technological advancements yet didn't go through the required sociological advancements that without just leaving them to their own devices with minimal outside interference only in the form of teaching, not handouts, will they ever hope to be self sustaining.
Yarrrr
I agree. John shows his own prejudice clearly: he thinks there are only two kinds of people in the World: Americans and 6 billion starving people.
I'm not sure I agree with your comparison here. What is worse, a man who believes that snake oil can cure cancer, or a man who knows better but claims publicly that snake oil can cure cancer simply because he gets more money that way? Here I assume that hits = money; this is not always the case but usually so.
And apart from the advertising money he gets from his provocative statements whether they are factually correct or not, I find it even more frightening that someone, somewhere, may profit also indirectly from the dissemination of certain lies and misconceptions, for instance the idea that children in third world countries need food and food alone rather than educational equipment. Once delivered, education tends to self-replicate, while food doesn't, or at least isn't intended to. And someone will be asked, in fact paid, to produce that food, over and over again.
Given the right tools, a good teacher can turn his students into new teachers. Given proper nutrition, a good belly can turn that nutrition into new bellies requiring more nutrition. Now wait a minute, is there something wrong with this analogy..?
When informed about his error, an ignorant man with good intentions may be willing to correct himself. However, if he already knows that he is wrong, but telling lies serves him best, he is unlikely to change. I think I prefer the former.
On having been to Africa, I'm in complete agreement.
What a lot of people don't realise is that most African's are fairly happy, and fairly adapted to their way of life. A computer won't help kids. A computer only helps administrators, and typists.
One of the projects I did while in Zambia was to help renovate a school. African's would rather have more materials for their schools, working radios they can teach with, or more access to simple life saving treatment such as blood or TB vaccines.
A rural teacher who I met simply wanted bars in the windows (holes) of his Oxfam built school so kids wouldn't climb in a steal what little supplied he had. Paper and pens were far far more useful than computers.
We have to look at India and China. They're becoming the world Math and Scientific elite. Employing an education system Britain abandoned 40 years ago in favour of modernising. Educations works.
Even though I dislike most religions and the dangerous ideologies they breed, religion in many developing countries is a key focus point for community driven development - people like to pitch in where there is a support structure; but support structures need money! Even if it's just food to sustain some of the 80% unemployed in Zimbabwe so they don't take to looting, hostage taking or drugs.
There are better things to donate money to: such as anti-corruption schemes or Médecins Sans Frontières.
Take your pick, GO TO A DEVELOPING COUNTRY AND SPONSOR A VILLAGE FOR AS LITTLE AS £50/m, just don't get a piece of technology for a child who can't charge it.
Matt
Da Blog
This is an incredibly important point: direct food aid competes w/ local production and serves to put farmers out of business. Note that Western food subsidies have been a major bone of contention in recent free trade treaty negotiations for much the same reason.
The XO, on the other hand, is very unlikely to put local chip fabs and ISVs out of business. Instead, it will facilitate learning and communication.
kieran hervold
keep shoveling food into their mouths but don't give them skills to work things out on their own? what kind of retardation does dvorak suffer from?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One purpose of the OLPC that doesn't get much press is that it's designed to replace textbooks: that's one point I heard several times from OLPC folks at a recent conference. The cost and replacement rate for textbooks can be prohibitively expensive-- far more than $200 / child /a couple of years.
http://bash.org/?3936
Also known as "Windows 3$-edition pre-installed on Classmates", to put a parallel to the current situation.
That's why Negroponte is trying to push hard for open-source solutions.
So there's no restrictive conditions. So people target by the OLPC can actually own the technology and not be hooked and dependant on a western seller (Microsoft).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The usual disclaimer: I will not read a Dvorak column, so I am ass-u-ming here that if he does bring up this point, he does so so cursorily that you did not think it worth mentioning.
The financial justification for the OLPC is NOT OLPC vs rice, but OLPC vs printed textbooks. The OLPC is financed by replacing printed textbooks.
You lose heavy, out of date, hand me down textbooks which are almost certainly in some foreign language, expensive to obtain, expensive to distribute.
You gain up to date digital textbooks in the native language, all of which can be easily carried at once, which are easily distributed, and whose cost is limited to the initial production and translation only.
There is another point which Dvorak has backwards. Which is more insulting to a third worlder, to give him rice which destroys his own agriculture and tells him he is too stupid to learn, or to give him textbooks which he cannot produce on his own and which give him hope for the future? Dvorak seems to think it is better to keep the third world ignorant and dependent on foreigners for food, rather than have them learn and stand on their own legs become competitors. That is the true insult.
Infuriate left and right
go join al qaeda
your idea to solutions to problems in this world is a good fit with their ideology
otherwise, you're just an asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think it is Dvorak being naive. Providing food to starving children solves nothing in the long run. Lack of food stems from underlying economic and political problems that food donation won't solve. You can feed those kids for one day, or one year, but inevitably donation fatigue sets in and the food stops coming, and either those kids or their kids starve to death.
On the other hand while donated money and food runs out, education lasts for a life time and can change the underlying economic picture. It is true, this won't help people who are starving to death right this moment, but unless their lack of food is a temporary situation, those people will starve to death eventually no matter what you do. It is a simple matter of triage. However, giving education to people now prevents them from being at risk in the future and will save more net lives and do more to improve the human condition.
Similarly domestically, I'm opposed to long term welfare for people that have demonstrated that they can't get a job for whatever reason, but I think that free education at all levels should be universal and much better funded. It makes more sense to spend money training people to support themselves and contribute to society then to spend money making people dependent on the state for their survival. In the long run, when the generosity of the state runs out, those dependent on it will die.
Starvation is one of those things that happens in terrible, isolated, usually temporary pockets. It happens as a result of natural disaster, politics, war, etc. (and then there's North Korea, where official rations are HALF the calories needed to qualify as "famine") But Dvorak raises a VERY good point. There's the obvious teach a man to fish counter-arguement, but for the price of a billion OLPCs (one laptop per child) you could likely provide constant access to fresh, clean water to almost everybody on earth. THAT would go a LONG way to fixing the health problems plaguing the world.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Yeah with the laptops in place they can outsource call centers there next, just use voip for the phone systems.
Customer: RING
Call center:(cluck clack) Haello MON thanks for calling Dehl (cluck clack) how may i be of service? (cluck clack cluck cluck)
Customer: WTF???
(You need to watch "the gods must be crazy to get it"
"Naive fiasco" is a pretty good description of any Dvorak article. I had never heard of the guy before his stories were linked on Slashdot because the PC press outside of the USA is not going to pay a cent for articles like his. I don't care if he owns half the magazine, he really needs an editor to catch his "the system idle process is eating my CPU" moments.
Oh right, that industry. Because all my harddrives are manufactured in Africa. If a country doesn't already have a PC hardware industry, this will actually create one - demand for replacement parts, upgrades, new machines, etc. It's quite different from undercutting an existing economy with free produce.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Meh, mentioning Dvorak around here is like dropping a steak into a shark tank. He might be a bombastic oaf, but he has a good point (just bad arguments).
I think the OLPC project will be a success. A success in the sense that at some point Negroponte will land on an aircraft and declare victory over the digital divide.
This is all liberal feel-goodery that will end in failure. Technology will always be changing the world, that is the nature of technology. But to think that we can "close the digital divide" by sending over laptops? Oh, but it's a start! Yeah right, the start of what? Will they pick up the laptops and use them to improve their lives? How is that exactly?
If you asked the future recipients of these laptops what they needed the most, I don't think it would be a laptop. I don't even think laptop would be in the top ten.
Maybe I should start a one server per child program.
my captcha is "trends", how interesting...
I wish it were that simple.
Before I get started, yes, I can't think of Dvorak as anything else than the infamous "why is my Idle process eating up 99% of my CPU cycles?" idiot. Yes, I think there may be some merit to OLPC. Still, just saying, reality isn't as simple as "The village idiot is against X, therefore X is the right thing to do."
The problem is that RL problems are almost never dichotomies. This is not a 2-choice RPG / Japanese dating sim / whatever. Sometimes when it looks like the choice is between X and Y, the real answer is actually Z. And there's a whole alphabet of answers A to V too, with various degrees of merit or lack thereof.
In other words, there for each one "right" answer there are a million of "wrong" answers, to various degrees of wrong.
Just because someone is an idiot, it doesn't mean that he'll always pick the opposite of the best answer. It just means that his logic is faulty, his facts dubious, and he can arrive at pretty much any point of the solution space without any reason. (Or rhyme.) He could even arrive at the right answer, by sheer random luck, in spite of the faulty logic. As they say, even a broken watch shows the right time twice a day.
What I'm saying is really a verbose and armchair philosophical version of this: A => B is not the same thing as !A => !B. _If_ A is true, then "A => B" says B must be true too. But if A is false, it doesn't say anything about B. It could be false, but it could just as well still be true anyway, for no fault or merit of A.
In this case we have, basically "if Dvorak has all the data and knows what he's talking about, then it's better to send food than OLPCs". That's your "A => B". Of course, we know that Dvorak is a professional troll, talks out of the arse, and couldn't tell his arse from his elbow. So we can say with some degree of confidence that the safe bet is !A. But that leaves us with no clue as to whether B is true or false. You'll need some other information and reasoning to determine B.
In most RL situations, even determining whether B is true or false, however, still is a bit short. As I was saying, RL problems have a lot of possible solutions, often a multi-dimensional continuum of them. Just knowing "an OLPC is better than a sack of rice" or viceversa doesn't say that either is the optimal solution yet. It could be that a third thing is far better bang-per-buck than both in the long run.
So to wrap this long rant up, well, you're still free to send them money if you want to. But use your own judgment and sources of information there. Don't do something just because the village idiot was against it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Give a man a bowl of rice and he eats for a day. Give a man access to all the information in the world and he can improve the way he does everything from farming,to building, to teaching his community.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
"But you know what they say, lad. 'Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.'" -- Terry Pratchett, "Jingo".
There, fixed that for you.
What happened to give a man a fish and he can eat tonight, but teach him to fish and he can get his own?
This comment isn't insightful. Dvorak is saying it's a waste of money to buy poor people laptops when you can buy even poorer people food. It's fine if Negroponte wants to sell poor people cheap computers without profiting financially, but asking people to donate money for his computers rather than give people food and useful technologies to help them improve their lives is a waste.
First words of any sense I've seen in this discussion!
and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to program, and he'll pwn you.
Seriously, giving more truckloads of rice to poor countries will do nothing to prepare their next generations for survival in a world dominated by people who grew up with Playstations, computers, and education.
Is any technical project truly a success until Dvorak says it's doomed to failure?
Dvorak probably hasn't spent much time in Africa. In my travels in the poorest province of South Africa, I came across a lot of kids who had food and shelter (humble but sufficient) and were dying for computers. They want to learn, to be part of modern society, which they are fully aware of because many of them have DVD players at home and they rent American movies. Africa is not mostly made of starving babies with flies in their eyes.
I don't mean to diminish the suffering of the many places where people are starving, and obviously in those areas people need food and medical care and more basic education before they get to computers. But it is absurd to complain about a useful humanitarian effort because it's not a different humanitarian effort. It's not like the companies that make the components for the OLPC would be making foodstuffs otherwise. The OLPC has the potential to serve a very real need in those areas, and perhaps develop people who would go on to help with the problems he's concerned with.
In any case, I'm not so concerned about the Dvorak troll as I am about perpetuating the ideas that a) "poor" areas need only food and medicine and b) anything other than that is somehow a waste of resources. It's a complex world and there are many ways to help. If one inspires you, do it, it's better than doing nothing.
Cheers.
give someone a fish...teach someone to fish....
I believe that is a reasonable distinction between the truck load of rice and a laptop,
There was absolutely NO evidence that ppl would want to use them. In fact, it took 25 years for them to be popular. It took Parc Place and Apple to make it happen. What that proves is the absolute lack of foresight that Dvorak has, while Jobs PROVED how innovative the parc place folks were (as well as a bit from Apple).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When they went from $100 to $200 I imagine they priced themselves out of the Chad market anyway. These things are going to end up in South America and some of Asia for the most part it looks like.
by feeding Dvorak to the poor.
- I mean really....he's a hack.
Try teaching something to a boy that has not eaten something in a day or two ... I can't see how a computer would help them in that case.
My mother teachs in a very poor school here in Argentina and I've seen kids to faint because they haven't received a meal in days and believe me, while I think OLPC it's a great project with the best intentions, I prefeer giving those kids some food.
No food, no learning at all.
It takes seeing that in person to really understand the situation.
Cheers,
Carlos
Someone mentioned the phrase "the diamond age", which reminds me that just recently I re-read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age . Like that book, I'm sure that some people would like to believe and hope that OLPC becomes some sort of real-world manifestation of The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, educating children that otherwise wouldn't ever have a chance to get any sort of meaningful education, thus elevating them and unbinding them from what would otherwise be a life of very little meaning and potential. Unfortunately there are, and always have been, too many people in the world that understand that knowledge is power, and that in order to control the masses, one must stifle education and limit the flow of information; educated peasants are usually not very obedient peasants because they know they have other options.
I hope I'm wrong about all this. Only time will tell.
It's a puck
if this is the tack he wishes to take.
Of course he's right that food is more important to a starving person than a dinky laptop, but it's going to take all sorts to sort out the world - and in my humble opinion the more things that are tried, the more likely we are to find genuine solutions (last 50 years of sending food around the world doesn't seem to have produced a noticable shift in geo-ecconomics).
Purely playing devil's advocate:
I don't see how you can argue that only primary aid should be given to people, neither do you and neither do your government. If that were the case then we 'in the western world' wouldn't bother trying to provide education for all. I mean what's the point in wasting money on educating people on the poverty line who cannot adequately afford food and shelter, in our own countries? Now I'm not going to be stupid enough to say that the current system works, that people actually receive the same quality of education, but I believe we all like the theory and would like it to eventually make it into practice.
Secondly just looking at the laptops, they will help - it's just we cannot be sure in what way, yet. Just putting aside the purely educational component, interesting sites are going to appear. Whereas we may have sites that let us know the price of a consumer trinket form 500 competing sites, I see no reason why something won't emerge that'll let people know the price of a particular subsistence crop at the 10 surrounding markets (both to buy and sell). Now that's just one example, but if anybody is feeling dubious, then they should just look at how GSM has changed many parts of the world (quite often POTS has been skipped completely).
To sum up, communication is 'good' and makes things 'better' - and everything that can be done to help this is therefore a good thing. Nobody nowadays criticizes Caxton for pissing about with printing presses amidst the egalitarian fun of the 15th century.
We don't need a lot of economic growth to address the problem
of the world's poor. We put subsistence farmers out of business
because that's our choice. Clean water would do more to alleviate
disease than high tech medicine. (Bill Joy, Wired 11.2003)
I do not own one, but I play the virtual machine.
It should come with a version like that of eeePC. The so call interface is very very bad.
If they decide to use python to write the menu system and let the students access and play with the code. That is fine. However, I would like to have it written in shell.
I just wonder how many of these people complaining that a $200 educational tool is a worse investment than $200 of food actually donates money to organizations that supply aid to these countries. I'm betting not too many.
I will repeat that, not all of africa is in a desperate struggle to simply survive.
Many people on that huge continent have the basic needs of life met. The thing they need is education to further develop.
People are really stupid when it comes to africa, they thing it is all starvation and death, and there is no one with the basic needs of life met.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
it's the truth that hurts and some people just can't handle having their beliefs questioned.
Go John go! Thanks for kicking those sacred cows.
PS. It's true, I have no respect for MacFanBoyz
I type "Dvorak" and my screen keeps showing "Dickhead".
Now I know why . . . .
It could also be a production problem (or more correctly, there could be a production solution). You can solve someone lacking food either by finding a way of getting food to them or finding a way of them producing (more) food locally (which may involve education and/or infrastructure).
There is also a massive range from people literally starving to where food is plentiful enough that people can engage in other activity that improves quality of living.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
"If only OLPC could get Dvorak to declare them a failure in advance, its fortune would be assuredly bright!"
Thanks, John!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
That's easy. You give the laptop to the kids in the country next door, where people aren't starving to death. Then 15-20 years later, they can help you help the starving kids better.
Are you adequate?
I just bought some kid an OLPC. I did the getonegiveone deal, and I plan to send the other one to an orphanage we support in Tanzania.
Excellent thoughts/comments in this thread. It's good to think globally. Whichever way you lean on this particular topic, I hope folks will consider taking some action.
Peace.
Your monitor is staring at you.
because they'll steal your fishing tackle and bait!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I myself have paid over a hundred dollars for a single textbook (which I later regretted having purchased). Hopefully, poor countries are not paying that much for textbooks on basic subjects, yet ~$180 US for a laptop doesn't sound too bad when compared to the cost of the pile of textbooks a typical elementary school student might be lugging to and from class every day. Depending on book prices, it is conceivable that the laptop is actually cheaper for some schools. This isn't the whole reason why people are excited about the XO, but the ability to not buy so many books is a significant benefit.
Secondarily, publishing is easier as well. If no one is willing to pay for the publication of dead-tree versions of a few tens of thousands of textbooks in some obscure language, perhaps someone else is willing to produce a pdf of the same thing and not bother with printing at all.
Mexico and Brazil certainly have plenty of minority languages under the deceptive surface of official Spanish or Portugese. So, it looks like you favour killing them, since no language survives for long when its speakers are schooled in something other than the language of the home.
Find out how YOU are part of the problem in 20 minutes:
:-(
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
Dvorak has such a wonderful track record and I actually feel a little bit better now he opposes OLPC.
Forget AIDS, people are starving! Forget cancer, people are starving! Forget USA schools, USA has starving people!
Dvorak: "3rd World" countries are not all in the same shape.
POLITICS are the real MAJOR problem to world hunger and too many people with the power to help are too clueless or 'evil'. Over population I'd maybe place a close second. Bankers/etc I'd place under politics since they are heavily entrenched in politics.
Don't forget the debt relief scams which have only made things worse for many nations; thanks to "banker/investor" types with political connections. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FC37F4B5EC10D27C
If you don't consume or produce goods YOU have NO value!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Dvorak, are you a kinder, gentler, compassionate clueless Christian/Nazi conservative or just an idiot?
...) is a massive global problem . One tool (food, or clean water, or ...) cannot solve a problem for humans in need.
...) are capable of subsistence farming/living. The NeoCon developed countries seem to (criminally/evilly) keep Third World Cultures in poverty in the same way that USA public education is almost an evil joke. Quality medical care is a private privilege and meager public ("let them eat cake") default. Corporatist farm subsidies, Oil and Defense Industry welfare, loan-shark/scam Financial institution (tax dollar) bailouts the USA Congress and POTUS (Hands Across America, Live AID, the Concert for Bangladesh, and so on. ) hand out money more to business, family, and friends than education and child care. So (nothing has really changed), maybe OLPC can provide a learning/education tool/option that will have for more value then any "feel good" bullshit.
.... I think a little green (laptop) for kids everywhere (USA, EU, China ...) could provide more success in the global war on poverty then the past 50 years of subsistence rations, emergency relief, and arms dealing to third world cultures in poverty (USA, EU, Russia, China, Arabia, Persia, Africa ...). I have great respect and admiration for MIT media lab, Nick Negroponte, RHS, Zimmerman ... and all the folks globally that provide for L/FOSS and humanity. [I have never attended MIT.]
... much. Yes, I could be wrong about the humanitarian value of the OLPC; However, that does not change your reality as an eloquent fool.
Third World Cultures in poverty (in USA, EU, Russia, China, Arabia, Persia, Africa
A gift of food or water always prolongs the tragedy of humanity, alone food does not solve any problem. All humans with adequate basic resources (food, shelter, learning, clean water
Mr. Dvorak, you are (IMO) a GDMF twit with (like Rush Limbaugh) more mouth than brains. OLPC is one of many tools needed in the war on global poverty.
MIT media lab and Nick Negroponte are more proactive on poverty, then your mouth. I already paid for a few OLPC, because as indicated above politicians and clergy get enough money to live very well, create amusement parks, bridges to nowhere, PTL-universities
I find you lacking
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The fundamental basis of Dvorak's complaint seems to be his inability to see past his prejudiced view that people in the third world are just too stupid and ignorant to figure out how to use computers for their own benefit. How else to explain his conviction that they won't be able to use computers because their literacy rate is so low--overlooking the rather obvious fact that one reason why literacy rates are so low in the third world is lack of access to anything worth reading, while computers and the internet will provide them with access to much of the world's literature (MIT has recently put the teaching materials for all of its courses online), not to mention a vehicle for delivering literacy teaching tools.
For another perspective, I recently received the following from a friend who is with the US forces in Iraq:
Where's the internet connection coming from? A rice-stealing dictator is hardly going to run broadband through the slums. First off, he'd rather put the money into a new Mercedes or tanks to suppress riots. Secondly he does not want to give extra communications infrastructure to his enemies.
That rice-stealig dictator will only give out OLPCs to his lackeys, not to those who need freedom from him.
Get real folk. Africa isn't fscked because it lacks PCs. It has more basic problems with crime and mismanagement. There is no evidence that OLPC will fix these.
Even in South Africa, where I lived for 30 years, installing infrastucture is almost impossible because stuff gets stolen so fast. Some years ago, the road building materials for some 10 miles of road got stolen over a long week end. Telephone and power wires get stolen for scrap befor they are even used. Even security fencing gets stolen!
You're kidding yourself if you really think an OLPC will make a difference.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
He hits the problem with the Classmate PC squarely on the head. I wish more Slashdot readers understood this!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Dear John,
You have made some good points, I'll give you that. Before people can be well educated they need to be well fed. Nobody I know of would disagree with that. Hunger is a terrible feeling and when you are starving, I would imagine it is hard to study or learn.
This is the holiday season, here in the United States many charities are competing for our dollars. There are red buckets at shopping mall enterances and every community has their "Toys for Tots" campaigns. Food shelves are on the news nightly telling us that their shelves are empty. Like "Feed the Children" and yes OLPC I see most of these charities as worth while and sadly, competing for the crumbs that I can afford to contribute.
I'm sure you are aware of the story that teaches us that if give a man a fish, he eats for a day, if you teach a man to fish, he can eat fish for life. OLPC is kind of like that. It is important to feed the hungry for today but when we have accomplished that there is still the problem of feeding them tomorrow. OLPC is a small cog in a big machine. OLPC aims to start equiping underprivlidged youth with tools that may help them learn a trade that will feed them tomorrow. Of course, we still have to feed them until they can stand on their own.
By your logic, only one charity out of many deserves funding. The world is more complex than that. I think you know that. While I would agree that there is far too little money to go around to all of the deserving charities, and in a way any new charity serves to dilute the pool even further, I also respectfully suggest that it is my right to choose who I contribute to and who I don't.
I grew up in a very low-income household. As a child I was bitten by the technology bug. Through a lot of hard work and a plan that I began executing at a young age, I rose up out of poverty and to a great degree I have technology in general and computers in particular to thank for that. If they can do this for me, they can do that for other children in less than ideal circumstances.
John, OLPC stands to help kids. You can go your way, I can go my way. I'll drop my change in the red buckets, I'll buy a toy for a kid, I'll contribute to United Way and I'll give a bit to OLPC and despite your article, I won't feel a moments guilt about it.
Happy Holidays,
Hey JD. They aren't ALL starving and unless you want to spend the rest of eternity buying them fish, you might want to consider a plan to teach them HOW to fish.
Seems to me there is enough wealth and good will to do both without trying to make the other sound foolish for trying.
Thomas Robert Malthus anyone?
Most people in the world are at least bi-lingual. It's a fact of life. Ideally, in the current climate you should also speak English. Not being bi-lingual, especially when you come from a small culture is only disadvantaging yourself. In fact most people in Brazil and Mexico that want to get ahead will try and learn English. There is no sense in preserving a niche language for the point of aesthetics, people need to communicate first.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
INTERVIEWER: Tell us how it works John
DVORAK: This is the formula for pissing off Macintosh users, for getting a lot of links or attention, and this has been deconstructed but never accurate, let me give you the deconstruction.
First I'd write something that would be semi-innocuous with just enough insulting stuff to get a lot of attention from the Macintosh community. So then they would write in, and by the way it would always be done in such a way that I would have outs, in other words I would write in kind of a weasel way. I would then, then I'd get one column with a lot of numbers.
Then I'd get a lot of hate mail and all kinds of Macintosh reaction and then I would react to it as though I was flabbergasted, that everybody misinterpreted me and they hated it and I don't get it and what was wrong with these people, which would piss them off even more. So I'd get huge hits, after that..
INTERVIEWER: What was the point of all this?
DVORAK: Now wait a minute, for the numbers..
INTERVIEWER: Which numbers exactly? What numbers are you looking for?
DVORAK: And, believe me, lots of numbers. Now then I let it simmer down for a while and when whatever position I had taken originally I would change the position exactly the opposite, and tell the Macintosh people I was completely wrong and they were right all along and the numbers would go through the ceiling! (laughter)
I do field work in a part of Russia where two minority languages are threatened by Russian. Speakers of these languages tell me constantly that it hurts them deeply to see their language threatened, and some are actively resisting the use of Russian even if it means they miss out on better economic opportunities. Language isn't just for communication between two people, it keeps a people connected to their past, improves solidarity in the village, and serves to encode their stories and songs. Just as you probably wouldn't think it cool to have your grandma stabbed repeatedly while you watch, you shouldn't be smiling over the death of something dear to a lot of people.
when i was a kid it was the chinese who were starving, and we worried about it. well look at them now. they didn't become an economic powerhouse sitting around waiting for hand-outs. they became self-sufficient and from there grew their society. and how.
dvorak is at best a crank, but there is something darker here. an anger and a bitterness that infects his thesis and derails it. fortunately, his influence is less than limited.
the olpc is shipping soon, the tools will be in the hands of those who need them and intellectual growth will follow. from there everything is possible.
- js.
But there's a wikipedia article on fishing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing. Now we start to appreciate Negroponte's true genius.
Now wash your hands.
If they get too smart with those laptops contributing to their education, they might take more jobs from us and not be willing to dig in diamond minds and such in a slave like existence.
1) Has he put any money to hunger relief or is he talking out of his ass?
2) "Let them eat cake" is completely full of shit in this context. Marie Antoinette said this because she didn't want to give the poor ANYTHING, and "cake" meant the ashed batter used to coat the oven walls. She was saying: "my subjects are meaningless to me, I don't care if they starve, If they are hungry, they can scrape burned crusty ash of the sides of their ovens and eat that."
OLPC, in contrast, is trying to give people educational tools to "teach them how to fish" so to speak.
Dvorak, you show us that you put any effort to helping third world children as Negroponte and OLPC does, and maybe we will listen, otherwise STFU.
Watch how some of the population of the Congo (currently in a decade long civil war) are treating the mountain gorillas, which have literally been massacred (as reported on a "60 Minutes" news report broadcast this evening 2007-12-09 entitled "Kings of Congo"; you can see it at
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3596417n&channel=/sections/60minutes/videoplayer3415.shtml
Unfortunately, laptops aren't gonna solve this problem, nor the charcoal mafia (refer to the video). This video, by the way, shows that mantra of "education" can be overrated. The people of the Congo KNOW that the gorillas are protected, they KNOW that they are valuable (by virtue of the fact that armed rangers are guarding the habitat), but a violent faction is willing to slaughter the gorillas for coal (or in worse cases, for their meat for human consumption). A teacher can "teach", but students can choose to IGNORE.
The charity Oxfam recently released a report that many of the problems that Africans suffer is due to the Africans themselves.
Likewise,
Dvorak finally has a lucid moment and he's lynched anyway
I don't read Dvorak's stuff. The only things I ever see from him are the rants that get referenced here. Does he have anything good to say about anything?
As for the OLPC, giving those will give them the opportunity to learn how to be self-sustaining, whereas giving them truckloads of rice teaches them to be dependent on governments that are at best inefficient, but in Africa are likely to skim major portions of anything donated. The 'give the man a fish/teach the man to fish' argument applies.
If the African kids get the XO, and they happen to run across Dvorak's writing, they will almost certainly pass it right by as being totally unhelpful to their progress. He's already pretty irrelevant here. That may explain his perpetually sour mood.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
makes it to were it is needed? I think thats the real question. I hear tell much of if it is used as administrative costs and whats left more often then not is either stolen by third world bureaucracy or diverted as a means of local genocide.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
I am not a Dvorak basher. He is definitely opinionated, but I kind of admire that. What concerns me about this whole situation is that no one is really walking a mile in those kids shoes. The kids these laptops are aimed at are in many cases living in squalor with little or no food. When they wake up in the morning and their hunger makes their belly hurt, I am sure that they would choose a bowl of rice over a toy without hesitation. Kids from all cultures have little sense of "value". If you don't believe me, ask your seven year old how much money they think you should earn in a year. Will OLPC save the world? Nope. Will it change the balance of power in the 21st century? I doubt it. Will at least one child who gets one actually use it to learn and eventually find a way to benefit all of mankind? I think so. In the information age, we sometimes forget what life was like before the internet. Our children don't know anything about life without computers. The OLPC initiative attempts to put children from poor countries on a more equal footing with kids that are way better off. I can't find a bad thing to say about this program, other than it is taking to long to implement. Potential corporate sponsors may even want to consider that their outsourcing of tech support jobs may very well employ some of these kids in the future. Good for Dvorak for pointing out something that we already know, but probably don't like to really think about. His position is as right as anyones.
Dvorak was informative a generation ago and funny a decade ago.
He's a waste of bandwidth now. The only way he can get page hits now is by saying things so outrageously stupid that people promptly blog about them with links.
Ignore him and he really will go away.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria? Didn't he die in a plane crash?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I agree with Dvorak.
Starving African children don't need a damn computer any more than they need a copy of the King James Bible that missionaries give them instead of something to eat. They need food! Ditch the whole project and use the money on Plumpy'nut.
How ya like dat?
Philanthropy does not always have to go to the single neediest person, since a world where everyone's life is minimally non-horrible isn't exactly much of anything to strive towards, and furthermore promoting sustainable economies is more of a long-range solution to keep people out of poverty than giving people rice is.
Many of us support all sorts of things that in some universal scale are "low-priority". For example I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Other people support environmental causes or donate to political parties. Other people endow university scholarships. Google sponsors Summer of Code when they could just cancel that whole project and spend their money on rice. Etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A lot of poor countries complain that "aid" is in effect a subsidy to western farmers plus product dumping, which completely destroys the market for their own local farmers. They'd prefer to have monetary support for their own local farmers instead of flown-in foreign food, but when they ask for donations of cash instead of food, they're usually told no due to fears of corruption. Now admittedly that's a real fear, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that paying American farmers to dump product cheaply on Africa is not going to make Africans richer. It does help American farmers, though, many of whom not coincidentally live in politically important states.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's bad form to criticize someone else's charity just because you think there is something more important. We're all different, we all have different passions, and we are all moved to help others using different talents and in different ways.
Also, people's needs differ in various parts of the world. Some people are not going hungry but could still use a boost to their education. There is enough need to go around, people should encourage each other's charity instead of attacking it.
The key word here is "teach." OLPC is a textbook, not a teacher.
I imagine a small African village containing 20 teenagers who speak good enlish, are kick-ass programmers with knowledge of the way the outside world works - and web access.
Twenty kick-ass programmers in a village of 900. Keep on dreaming.
The kid who wants to know how the world works moves on to the big city, the capital. He doesn't stay in the village and he doesn't find reality on the web.
Tribal rug makers can sell their rugs on eBay for hundreds of dollars - they can use the computer to allow customers to upload designs like CafePress does - they can go into the custom rug making business.
The value of a tribal rug is in the tradition of tribal designs.
What you are proposing is simply the outsourcing of labor at the expense of your own native craftsman whether they be Appalachian quiltmakers or the native American weavers of the desert Southwest.
Teach a man to troll, he's annoying for a day.
Pay Dvorak to troll, and he's annoying for the rest of his life.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Firstly, the vast majority of the people in Peru, Brazil and Mexico who are likely to receive a $100 laptop speak the official language as their first language. They also live in cities of greater than 8 million people. Secondly, I said people need to become bilingual, I don't think they should forget their roots. Becoming bilingual as a methodology for escaping poverty makes sense. Rejecting the outside world for some romantic notion of past culture doesn't. But the good thing is you don't have to forget your past to advance in the future.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
"The XO is not intended to go to children who can't afford food. How dense can some people be?"
Sounds to me like, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How dense indeed!
It's a she. She presented in June 2007 at TED Africa, in Tanzania.
She's also been appointed a Managing Director of the World Bank, starting December 1 2007.
She has an A.B from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Ref: http://financialnigeria.net/NEWS/news_item_detail_archive.aspx?item=124
"Piter, too, is dead."
If you read TFA, Dvorak groups the starving third world with Birmingham Alabama in the opening paragraphs. Besides being a bigot he misses the finer points of the XO laptop. It is the distribution of text books. It does not mater if you are in the USA or the third world, if you can push out the text book on to the XO you can save money. The publishers will have to follow, that is capitalism. What does Dvorak not understand - the universe. XO - I gave - I wait.
Just because every other laptop U bought became a worthless, obsolete piece of trash in a year doesn't mean this one will.
People need to pick up their credit cards and buy this product now. How dare anyone question the wisdom of the group, the truthfulness of their chairmen, directors, presidents, and VP's in favor of their own theory.
Just look at the millions of Americans who, just by buying an iPhone, were saved from poverty and became OpenGL programming geniouses.
http://www.fas.usda.gov/grain/circular/2006/05-06/graintoc.htm
Global grain supplies have been behind demand six of the last eight years. And the demand for ethanol and bio-diesel (silliness, using people food to feed our vehicles) is only going to increase. Peak Grain, should it happen, will make Peak Oil look nice.
There are no easy solutions.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
The main effect of western food aid on developing nations is to kill their own agriculture and ensure permanent dependence on foreign aid and food imports, since producers in those nations can't compete with free. To make things even worse, the same nations that send food aid have erected barriers to allow producers in those nations to export their agricultural products.
Except for very short term disaster relief, sending food "aid" to developing nations is evil.
Dvorak predates even Slashdot, I'm pretty sure.
People with extreme opinions are interesting, for better or worse. That's why so many columnists and radio talk show hosts present extreme opinions. I wager that a large chunk of their audience, if not most of their audience disagrees with them, and may even hate them. Dvorak puts out insane predictions, and writes controversial opinions largely because it provokes such a strong reaction.
He has been known to express fanatic opinions, and later roll over later like he doesn't even care, which leads me to believe that he expresses fanaticism just to provoke people. Hence, he is a troll. He has been provoking people with his columns since 1986, which really might make him the first troll for computer geeks. Quoting from Wikipedia for proof of his trolly-ness.
"On 9 June 2006, he explained to Dave Winer that he would bait Mac users in order to increase traffic to his website."
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
At least 20 times in this discussion, someone's said "Give a man a fish, he has food for a day; teach a man to fish, he has food for a lifetime."
Nowhere in there does it say "give a man's kid a computer, and he'll have food for a lifetime." What the kid will have is a fancy gadget that he has no idea how to use, that does almost nothing to help his daily life, and that has zero connectivity or compatibility with the way the rest of the computerized world works (and I say that as a Mac user.) Someone here bragged about a special button on the keypad that enables source code editing of the current application. 99.9% of American kids would have no idea what to do with that, and they've got a titanic advantage in technical expertise from the get-go.
How about, y'know, teaching people to fish? Well, actually, they already know how to fish. Buy 'em a boat that works, so they can actually do some fishing. Get a bunch of 'em to work on building a good road to the capital city. Buy a dozen of them a delivery truck each, so they can deliver food in to town, and buy one the tools and training he needs to repair the trucks. For more developed areas, scale it up: help someone start a small manufacturing shop, a textile mill, a hydro power plant, a computer store. Provide capital equipment and infrastructure to help them take one technological step up at a time.
OLPC makes the same mistake that Dvorak does: they fail to see "progress" as the gradual development of an interconnected, self-maintaining infrastructure, in which each person helps to build, maintain, and develop stuff needed by someone else. The broader and deeper that network, the more successful the society. Dropping stuff out of the sky, whether it's high-tech computer or sacks of food, does nothing to develop that web.
Other have already said it well, but the rebuttal is clear: OLPC isn't supplying computers to kids who need food. It's supplying computers to kids who need computers. As spelled out here: http://www.cluedom.com/cluegrams/technology/olpc_computers_for_starving_children Will have to forward that to Johnny. Maybe he thinks any kid without a computer is starving?
*NP*
People who study women as much as they study computers will become as good with women as they are with computers.
I was making my money washing dishes and living in poverty myself until a friend helped me get my first computer and access to the web. With the information I found, I was able to educate myself and now I repair high powered lasers and program robots.
So
Obviously it isnt going to make alot of difference to the people who are living in mud huts somewhere in the Congo(give them the rice), but in the right hands it could be just the thing to help improve the situation.
I always knew Dvorak was a rather dumb person, but this takes the cake. Can you really miss the truth by such a wide margin, yet still feel entitled to write pompous drivel about your ideas?
There's so much wrong with his inane drivel that I don't even really know where to start. Of course peole who are hungry now want rice and not a PC. But guess what, these people aren't the ones getting the PCs anyway, so it makes no sense to complain about them getting PCs instead of rice. They don't!
But maybe they should. Maybe Dvorak should spend a few minutes educating himself about why we need to give rice to those people, and what the effect of our giving rice to them is. Most countries with wide-spread famines could actually produce enough food for themselves. They don't because their corrupt governments sell the food (sometimes to feed cattle in other countries), pocket the money, or spend it on their armies instead of on helping their people. Educating the people in these countries is the first step towards helping them understand these issues, and helping them organizing so they can replace their governments with ones which won't enslave them and sell their food. The OLPC can be a step amongst many towards helping these people.
Giving people rice only makes them dependent on us. Giving people knowledge and networks gives them power, and may allow them to help themselves in the future.
Is that a good deal of it doesn't get where it is supposed to be. The same goes for medicine, clean water and such. Its a major headache for aid agencies to identify quickly what is needed and where, especially during a crisis.
Wouldn't it be nice if the poorest regions of the world had large numbers of machines that could store, process, and communicate such information?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I can't believe that dvorak could be so near-sighted, 'If you give a man a fish, he will beg for another, but if you give him a fishing rod and teach him how to fishing, he can live by himself". If we only give african rice and stuff like that then it will take longer for them to develope a good economy, but if we teach the kid how to use the internet i'm sure they will grow much faster.
I haven't even bothered to read the article (in good /. style) and hope the summary is accurate.
Having lived in a development country for 3 years and my partner is working for a development organisation and has a MSc in development, I find this naive (isn't that ironic!) argument of Dvorak (and many other people) just ridiculous. I won't go off in a big rant, just raise my main points:
1. Hunger relief (and medical relief like Medecins Sans Frontieres do) is ok for an emergency situation. Long term it destroys the local markets and makes people dependent on the aid. Educated people in the development sector learnt from the disasters that the old aid systems in the 80ies brought. Handing out freebies that makes people lose skills (farmers leaving their plots because aid food is free, tailors not producing clothes because second-hand clothes from developed countries are cheaper, etc) is a sure-fire way to keep people in poverty.
2. Education and teaching skills is (currently thought of to be) the most effective way to help countries develop. That's what organisations like the Peace Corps or VSO and many others do. After having learnt that the free aid system doesn't work, most hope is on this new transfer skills system. Mind you no-one knows yet if it will work either and every country is different.
3. OLPC is not a laptop project, but an education project. The developed laptop is only developed as a tool to teach and it is designed to be long-lived and not dependent on existing electricity.
It would be good if people educate themselves better before making comments that professional development workers (at least all that I know) will argue against immediately.
You all said what I'm thinking about Dvork ;-)
So- my gratitude goes to all of you for being my virtual family!
And let us support the cause towards education and information to the 3rd world- which I call home.
Even if the XO-1 was meant for famine-struck countries, sending computers for education there would still be better than sending food.
Dvorak apparently belongs with the group of people who believe they can buy off their own guilt by ridding broke people of their basic needs for one day.
Too bad though that most famine-struck countries usually go by the convention of "my children must support me in my old age", thus sending a 200 kilo bag of rice does not mean "hey, let's ration this fucker", no it means "hey, lets get some more kids and we'll be well off when we grow old". The reason why a country is famine-struck in the first place is because the country is not able to support itself with food; making the populace believe there's food enough by sending relief is on par with destabilizing an entire country which is trying to find its equilibrium, harsh but true.
If the OLPC helps the children and their parents to get aware of the evil tactics of Monsanto and similar companies that want to make them dependent on genetically manipulated seeds, the $200 are more than worth.
Just my two cents.
In an effort to stem his slide into irrelevance and anonymity, John Dvorak, long-time practitioner of the cheap-shot column, fired off a broadside which, while full of clichés, manages to avoid being informative, entertaining or original.
Displaying the insight and courage that's won Mr. Dvorak the coveted title of Web Pussy - the web award for belaboring the obvious, gratuitously angering readers, ignorance of all things technical and being consistently wrong - repeatedly, he asks whether a little, green computer or $200 worth of rice would be more helpful to a hungry child.
Congratulations to Mr. Dvorak for the hope he brings to arrogant, supercilious blowhards.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
It's true, there are many starving people in the world, which we could and should do something to help. However, it is possible to be desperately poor without actually starving; it is fully possible to grow up in a place where you have no future, no hope, nothing. Those people also need our help, and helping poor people with education may give them at least the chance to improve their lives. You can die from starvation, but is it worth living if life is nothing but empty desperation? It is in our own interest too, helping poor people not only to survive, but also to improve their lives and enable them to stand on their own. When people feel they have nothing to live for, they are much more willing to die as martyrs.
Years and years of sending emergency (food) aid has proved that sending emergency food aid is not the way to provide lasting improvements. The only way to provide lasting improvement is through education and government reform.
Give them seeds (not terminator) that will go to replace the grain lost to war. Give them calves (or embryos and grow the calf in the country and ship more locally) to grow into milk-producing meat-producing animals. Give them lots of goats that will turn scrub grass into meat more efficiently than a cow. Give them produce that will grow into what they need.
Give them medicines that will make them better, so they can support themselves.
Don't give them flour, powdered milk or supplements. Don't give them treatments that will require us to give again.
Basically the OLPC is a good idea. Just because he thinks that another idea is better doesn't mean he should slam the other. Anything that's positive should be encouraged. I don't even think he should be directly comparing the two things - as I understand it anyway (pls correct me if underinformed!) the OLPC initiative is is effectively a commercial but non-profit venture. So, as such it's not as if it has funds that could be used for aid that it's diverting. Providing food is purely aid i.e. you can't set up an initiative to give food and have it self-sustaining as OLPC is as it doesn't generate any income.
Just for the record, help has many stages. You start with emergency relief to stop people from simply starving to death, but you can't keep giving them just food - you have to help them become self sufficient (unless you are keen to maintain a dependency on foreign aid). OLPC is one of the tools to enale the required educational resources.
Personally, I find this a new low for Dvorak that he needs to troll worthy projects for hits. It's almost as if he's bought by Intel and MS.. Umm, wait a moment. Who advertises? Ah, yes..
Insert
I'm from Russia. I know you have previously blamed Putin for this but isn't it a problem with indigenous languages everywhere else in the world? For instance there Native American languages with less than 10 speakers left. It is sad but I think everywhere in the world they are doomed in the face of the dominant economic and cultural power.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
I've had misgivings about the OLPC since before it ever came to light, having thought about the idea of zero cost computing for almost a decade. The social politics really got to me. But now that Dvorak is out with his statement it is clear to me: OLPC is a good thing^tm. General rule of thumb: if dvorak hates it then it's gotta have something good in it, ex officio.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
For just this once, we agree. Now never post a Dvorak article again.
Whatever his motives(just to be a Troll or not) he is right in the sense that people are naive about how this will change the world and how pissed they get when someone tells them that. The error he falls into is that the "Laptop or the Rice" is an oversimplification. It is not one or the other there is a massive middle ground that needs to be covered to get to the Laptop part.
I think also that there is a problem with how the OLPC PC is being marketed. It should not be used in situations that he gave in Africa with the literacy problems, the money could be spent on basic schooling and trade skills. The ideal situations for the OLPC is third world developing countries like Mexico and Peru(these countries have purchased the laptops) were there is an infrastructure and basic economy to support this kind of development.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
and that is plug John's blog
http://www.dvorak.org/blog
It's so easy to do the emotional response thing and ship food there. It's must harder to do the smart, responsible thing and help people to help themselves. Rather than flood the economy with free food (lowering the value of farmed local food), better to educate the children, and teach better, more efficient local food raising practices. Many areas are still using subsistence farming, and are not using the better, disease resistant, higher yield seed stock.
Give a man a fish/teach a man to fish. It's so true, even if it might not be the emotional response.
When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice
Um, what about the tens (probably hundreds) of millions of poor African kids who don't live in "absolute poverty" but already have their basic food and shelter needs taken care of? (The MAJORITY in fact - most of Africa isn't starving, do some basic research please) --- don't they deserve charity or education?
Honestly Dvorak, STFU and let people decide for themselves what they think it's best to spend THEIR money on.
At point 3, if 'man' would really be left in a worse position accepting the loan (and its known associated risks), why doesn't he just say 'no'? You seem to imply the West has a gun against everyones heads, as opposed to the truth, that as free-thinking autonomous entities they make their own decisions for which they are responsible. Anyway, Western capital has on the aggregate helped emerging economies massively to achieve growth, skills and knowledge faster than they would have been able to otherwise (in case you hadn't noticed, emerging economies are booming globally on a scale unprecedented in human history); and ironically enough though, emerging economies like China are also far more flush with capital than Western economies right now. But don't let facts and logic get in the way of a good old-fashioned "West-bashing".
Yeah Dvorak is a little troll monkey trying to get ad dollars as usual (no I didn't click on his link). However, I am going to have to agree with the principle here. There are so many more things a developing country needs before it needs laptops. If you're going to give tech to kids in developing nations I think One Bicycle Per Child is a much more useful proposition. I'm sure it could be done for less than $50 per child and I think kids will get a lot more use out of a bicycle than a computer. Often children have to walk many miles to school and back every day. Markets and city centers are often many miles away. It just seems like a more useful distribution of technology. And for severely impoverished regions a truckload of food will have a more beneficial impact than even a few bicycles (assuming the food gets to the right place). I hate to say it, but Dvorak has the right idea.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying OLPC is a terrible idea or that just because something isn't perfect we shouldn't do it. If you need a computer and the XO will meet your needs. Excellent. Get it. Hopefully the second laptop will be delivered somewhere they have a solid infrastructure and textbooks, just not the next level of tech that could benifit the kids. That way it will be less of a "let them eat cake" scenario. Wouldn't it be great if every time we purchased something at 1st world prices someone else would receive the equivalent in a third world country. The concept is awesome. I just think it could be applied to more useful things in the third world. Like food or a bicycle.
If Dvorak calls it a failure then it's guaranteed success!
Dvoraks Law of Inverse Opinion: Where John Dvorak opines one state the reverse state is invariably true.
A long time ago I took him seriously and waited on buying a computer because he said PowerPCs running Workplace OS would sweep the market. Heh... Last time I made that mistake.
"Nearly one in four people, or 1.3 billion--a majority of humanity--live on less than $1 per day.."
Since when is 1 in 4 a majority? A plurality, perhaps, but by no means a majority.
Damn wealth enviers can't even do the math right!
...aren't the primary target of the OLPC: most of the launch countries aren't in Africa, and the launch countries aren't, in Africa or otherwise, mostly the poorest of the poor. And while OLPC is a charitable non-profit, the model isn't one that is fairly presented by presenting a choice between giving a computer and giving rice: mostly, the OLPC project is selling laptops to countries that choose to buy them, but not making a profit in doing so.
It doesn't represent a choice between giving kids rice and giving them computers, at least, not a choice by the West. And the people that are benefitting from them aren't, for the most part, the ones for whom giving rice would make any difference at all. And, unlike giving rice (but like microcredit programs and other programs that have shown lots of success in the developing world), the OLPC project is aimed at developing independence, not developing dependence for the day-to-day necessities on outside aid.
Oh, wait he isn't, is Borat, sorry . . . No, seriously, please stop giving any attention to this looser. It is as relevant today as an 8086!
Does anyone but me see the OLPC XO-1 as an insulting "let them eat cake" sort of message to the world's poor?
.. :)
Let them buy guns would be a more apt analagy. This is yet another repeat of that total BS regarding the OLPC diverting resources that could be better spent on feeding the worlds hunger. The fact is that there is no shortage of food in these areas. Generally where you see famine it is invariable accompanied by wars and inter-ethnic strife.
For instance the current situation in Darfur is caused by the Government engaging in a little ethnic clensing of the non-Arab population.
'I'll donate my money to hunger relief'
Mr. Dvorak, you would be better occupied asking who sold them the guns to engage in such attrocities and who gave them the bank loans
'Eritrea and Ethiopia - two of the world's poorest countries - spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the war'
Who loaned them the money to buy the weapons. The answer to that is the real obsenity, as is this bogus concern coming from you.
davecb5620@gmail.com
'It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice'
..
The reason they are starving is they have been displaced from their land. The choice given them is getting shot or starving. The choice is usually made for them
Re:he's got a point. (Score:3, Bogus analogy)
davecb5620@gmail.com
Sterilizations - that will do much more good in the long term.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
"Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime"
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Its certainly true that OLPC could provide a huge incentive to improve education in some of the world's poorest and least economically stable countries. I'll use West Africa as an example. Friends of mine in the Peace Corps over there tell me that the average male is lucky to get through middle school, whereas females are married around age 15, with kids soon after.
However, OLPC, while laudable, is a case of skewed priorities. Ask someone who has done relief work over there and they'll tell you that in order for things to change, folks in W. Africa need to get healthier first, educated second. In Mali, the average life expectancy is in the mid-40s! There is a reason why the Gates Foundation is spending so much money on medical research for diseases like malaria. To make things worse, international donations are for the most part prodigiously misspent--as an example, one town with no refugees was mystified to suddenly receive a shipment of tents from the UN, and promptly turned a good portion of them into a giant bar.
Dvorak is a bombast and a demagogue, but he has a point. The motivation behind OLPC is great, but throwing money at a problem is not necessarily going to solve it. Instead of one laptop per child, how about one VACCINATION per child? That kind of investment would yield measurable, tangible results almost immediately.
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Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
The OLPC runs Linux. The Kernel is Linux. You can install all the apps you want (or at least many :). TOH, the user interface is different (this is more like running xfce rather than Gnome or KDE).
...to Dvorak is just to buy one. I did.
Dvorak is awesome and his points are valid. What good is technology with no infrastructure? I got my first laptop when I was 18, why does every child even need one? Some of these slashdot users must be pretty deluded to think that a fisher price laptop is going to solve all the world's problems.
John C. Dvorak doesn't like them? Then things are looking up for them! They must've dome something right? Given Dvorak's record, they must be destined for success!
I mean, you're either trolling, or you just equated bi-lingual education to stabbing old women. Either way...
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Most computing skills ARE transferable across platforms and applications (those who aren't exactly the same :). Yes my fingers still type ctrl-c rather than apple-c most of the time, but it's basically the same. And look at how much easier it is to learn your second programming language, or GUI library.
Many of the ideas and operations are fundamentally the same. Even if they end up using Windows later on, they will learn it faster than if they had never seen a computer, and they will actually learn deeper (it is very hard to distinguish essence from accident when you only have one data point)
Why feed the trolls?
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Does anybody read what this guy writes anymore?
Give an Ethiopian a bag of rice, he will have access to food for a week. Give him OLPC and the Internet, he'll have vast knowlege for a lifetime.
Thanks. I was under the impression that everyone connected to the Nigerian financial world had died in one plane crash or another.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!