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Why Intel and OLPC Parted Ways
runamock writes "The New York Times has an article that sheds some light on why Intel left the OLPC board: 'A frail partnership between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child educational computing group was undone last month in part by an Intel saleswoman: She tried to persuade a Peruvian official to drop the country's commitment to buy a quarter-million of the organization's laptops in favor of Intel PCs. Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children. But the saleswoman's tactic was the final straw for Nicholas Negroponte.'"
TFA: "If I can sell 1.5 million computers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, I will feel a lot better than other sales we might make."
It seems that there is no need to characterize the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ethiopia might not be so much in focus, thus it might be interesting to give a quote: "The United States has quietly poured weapons and military advisers into Ethiopia, whose recent invasion of Somalia opened a new front in the Bush administration's war on terrorism.
A Christian-led nation in sub-Saharan Africa, surrounded almost entirely by Muslim states, Ethiopia has received nearly $20 million in U.S. military aid since late 2002. That's more than any country in the region except Djibouti.
Last month, thousands of Ethiopian troops invaded neighboring Somalia and helped overturn a fundamentalist Islamic government that the Bush administration said was supported by al-Qaeda.
The U.S. and Ethiopian militaries have "a close working relationship," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter said. The ties include intelligence sharing, arms aid and training that gives the Ethiopians "the capacity to defend their borders and intercept terrorists and weapons of mass destruction," he said." (emphasis mine)
Am I the only one who feels that there is something strange about exactly this selection of countries as an intial target market?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Intel and the group had a rocky relationship from the start in their short-lived effort to get inexpensive laptops into the hands of the world's poorest children.
Speaking of Godwin...
The world's poorest children are the progeny of the world's poorest parents, who, by and large, are poor because, well, let's face it: They just aren't that smart.
In fact, they're pretty darned stupid.
In the case of Peru, Lynn & Van Hanen guestimate a mean Peruvian IQ of about 90:
Ergo, right off the bat, about 50% of all Peruvian children [the ones with IQ's below 90] will be uneducable, and I doubt that much more than 20% of them will have IQ's up around the threshold of 100 which is necessary if you want to have any hope of being able to engage in abstract thinking with even the prospect of the most marginal of success.
I.e. only about 1/5th of these children possess the gray matter necessary to use a computer to write letters or essays, to organize data in a spreadsheet, or to fill out a PDF tax form. And that 1/5th will have parents who are wealthy enough to have computers in the household already.
For the rest of them [the other 80%, or thereabouts], they'll just be using their OLPC laptops to download pr0n and text-message their meth dealers [or clients].
Which is to say: These children don't need laptops - they need an alteration to their genome.
1: The software sucks. They tried to reinvent the PC from the ground up, and a lot of it went badly wrong (predictably). Much of it doesn't work, and what does work, works poorly.
2: The hardward sucks. This is actually as it was intended, but they planned to make up the difference with good software. They didn't. They waste the very limited hardware budget on frippery like cameras, microphones, and multiple pointing devices while having a horribly underpowered CPU with little RAM running MIPS-hungry, memory-hogging interpreted languages. It's bad design.
3: The product costs double what they intended it to cost. Double! A $200 price tage is a deal-breaker for something originally made famous as the "$100 laptop". Yes, it will get cheaper as it gets older. It will also fall further behind real PCs and competing gadgets.
4: It's untested, unproven, unfinished, and they expect buyers to commit to spending huge sums of money on it while it's still in this uprepared state. If you're going to do something this radical, you need to demonstrate it in small pilot projects first. Spend a few years with a few thousand kids and actually prove that it's better than spending the same money on textbooks, pencils, and paper. Also: prove that you don't get 50% breakdowns in the first 3 months of use. Even that isn't proven yet.
5: There is competition. A hundred-dollar laptop would have been quite the thing. A two-hundred-dollar computing gadget that isn't worthy of being called "laptop" is something achievable by any reasonably competent technology company. The plan of the OLPC was to fill a vacuum and be accepted just because they're the only game in town. They're completely unprepared to compete.
6: The OLPC's plan was based on huge $100 million paid-in-advance orders and organized, competent distribution and support from the world's poorest, least well-run, and most corrupt governments. The advance orders are falling apart in some countries, and you can expect the distribution and support to fail in others.
Mark my words, the OLPC will be remembered as an embarassing failure.
Of course not. What is going on at Intel, and more clearly in Redmond, is far worse. These institutions, that have such a powerful affect on communities all over the world, are currently dominated by social darwinists (see also here, and also here).
SD is a kind of religious belief in certain Higher Laws that justify extreme competition, to the point where its adherents have a pathologically warped understanding of the concepts of "altruism" and "community". SDists are always striving to get a bigger piece of the pie, because they see that kind of competition as being good for humanity and human institutions: it is supposed to force others to better themselves, and it is supposed to force poorly competitive institutions into restructuring into something that better fits their niches in the social ecosystem.
This constant need to compete makes it impossible for SDists to truly see the benefits of altruistic efforts to make the entire pie bigger. In the extreme, the SDist prefers to fight to secure a larger share of seed corn to munch on now, than to help with a community effort to develop new farmland and get much larger harvests for everyone later.
In the extreme case, when confronted with successful community efforts to make bigger pies, the rabid SDist goes potty-mouthed, and starts throwing chairs and making lethal threats. I don't believe Intel is quite that extreme. But the Intel corporate culture is definitely dominated more by SD than is good for it, or for anyone else.
However, it could quite possibly be that there is no sch thing as a limit to what a human mind can learn, and by human mind I am including those person who by luck and misfortune happen to have been born in regions of the world where knowledge resources are traditionally restricted to the ruling elite. This theory is perhaps the pedagogical underpinigs which the OLPC is attempting to address.
Or, it could quite possibly be that there is such a thing as a limit to what a human mind can learn.
Which, of course, there is.
An OLPC laptop will not turn a child with an IQ of 90 [or 80 or 70] into a child with an IQ of 120.
Rather, it will turn a child with an IQ of 90 into a child with an IQ of 90 who was handed a laptop on a silver platter [i.e. who didn't even have to work to earn the laptop in the first place].
The OLPC program, like all other programs of its ilk, is doomed to failure.
In another five years, it will have been forgotten, and the educrats who con you into subsidizing their [rather lavish] lifestyles will have moved on to some other con designed to fool you into parting with your money.
And the poor children with IQs of 90 [or 80 or 70] will still be saddled with the same IQs they started out with, only they'll be a little older, and a little further along in their journey towards becoming adults with IQs of 90 [or 80 or 70] - adults with memories of many years spent surfing pr0n on the OLPC laptops which they were given as children.
PS: If laptops are so über-good for low-IQ children, then why don't you give them something even less expensive, more environmentally friendly, and far better for their intellectual development, namely: Books?
Because everyone knows that the books will never be opened - they won't even spend any time on a shelf gathering dust before they will immediately be discarded in the garbage [unless maybe the pages are torn out to be used as toilet paper].