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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.'"
One Laptop Per Nigger?
amirite?
Thats a load of horseshit and you know it. OLPC is just as much about making a profit to keep the operation going as it is for Intel. Dont kid yourself about that. Their motives might be good (and a good number would tell you even THAT is very questionable, when they are selling computers to people whos popuations go without healthy DRINKING WATER) but in the end they are selling just the same.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
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)
"It's a little bit like McDonald's competing with the World Food Program." -Nicholas Negroponte referring to Intel's marketing of the Classmate laptop in competition with the OLPC.
The OLPC is a gadget, something like a Palm with a keyboard. Software has to be specially written for it, trapping its users within the services provided by charity and government. It is a potentially useful educational tool, but having one isn't the same as having a PC.
The Classmate is a full-fledged notebook PC which runs standard software. It allows users to participate in the mainstream and explore the full potential of computing.
McDonald's is a fast food company which sells unhealthy, low-quality food. In the comparison, the OLPC is by far the "junk food" of the pair.
This is more like a supermarket offering to sell fresh meat, produce, and other wholesome foods at low prices in a market where a "charity" that distributes bags of white rice (but charges for its full cost!) would prefer for people to have no other options.
I can understand breaking the OLPC/Intel partnership. They are somewhat in competition. However, insults like this show that Negroponte never had a reasonable attitude.
"Intel attempts to subvert efforts to get computers to children."
Not at all, they offered an alternative computer for the children.
"For about twice the price. Which means half the number of units."
Where did the article say half the number of units?
"Well, no. They just dont like kids quite as much as they like money."
Same could be said for you. Where's your money for the children's computers? Intel contributed cash to the OLPC effort.
"This will go on their permanent record and get weighed in for future purchases."
Considering the intellect you've demonstrated, I'm sure your permanent record is a grave threat to Intel.
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.
Biology is a part, but even more important is environment (for comparisons within a species).
Sadly, that's just not true.
If you were to take one of these Peruvian children, with an IQ of 90, and put them in an intensive, decade-long, 8-hour a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year course of intellectual training, you might [JUST MIGHT!] be able to push their IQ test scores up to around 95 [although, at that point, you'd be in Pavlovian Dog territory, and you'd have to wonder whether they really understood what they were doing, or were merely parroting the answers as they had been taught to parrot them], but, fundamentally, you'd only be working at the margins.
As a case in point, the LAUSD is already spending in excess of $18,431 per child, per year, on a clientele of students who are largely African-American & Mestizo-Aboriginal illegal aliens, with mean IQ's around 85, and even at that price [$18,431 X 12 = $221,172 - which doesn't begin to address the time value of the money], they can only get about 7% of them up to the modern SAT average of 1000 [which is a classical SAT score of 890]:
And even there, the 7% of all LAUSD students who make it to 1000 on the modern SAT almost certainly have last names like "Nguyen" and "Diem".
There just isn't enough money in all the world to get every child with an IQ of 90 to the point where they can mimic the behavior of a child with an IQ of 95, and there certainly isn't an infinite supply of spinsters like Ann Sullivan who would be willing to devote decades of their lives to such a Quixotic fantasy.
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.
If the OLPC project will turn out to be a failure then it's sad rather than embarrassing. Here is that traditional communist optimism!
Hey, it sounds like a good idea, and their motivations are pure, therefore any failure that results could only be caused by an evil conspiracy against them!
The OLPC is first and foremost a project to convince several third-world governments to each spend hundreds of millions dollars from their limited education budgets on unproven technology. Full stop. The handful of scientists and engineers donating design effort are insignficant compared to the billions of dollars the organization wants to take from third-world governments and spend on manufacturing.
Remember to put that first: the OLPC wants to collect billions of dollars from the third world. Here's something to put second: the leader of the OLPC is opposed to competition and the consideration of alternatives. Negroponte's objection in this story is that Intel is trying to offer something to achieve the same benefits as the OLPC is aiming for. He doesn't want those governments to be offered the choice.
Think about that! He wants the grubby little brown people to stop listening to the evil capitalists and their wicked offers and accept his benevolent guidance of their education systems through his grand pedagogic experiment on all their little brown children. He doesn't even want the evil capitalists to be allowed to talk to the grubby little brown people, since grubby little brown people can't be trusted to think for themselves when white men are talking.
Good intentions and a pure heart don't just automatically make a beneficial outcome. This is classic academic socialist naivety, expressing itself in a virulently communistic, top-down-government, "we know best stop thinking about it", viciously anti-competitive form.
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].
flop, flop, flop...
The XO is an underpowered, overdesigned computing gadget that's full of bugs because they reinvented the wheel and incompatible with basically everything.
good intentions != better result
more design effort != better product
The XO is a show off project for the contributing techies. That's part of why it's a $200 "$100 laptop". Like that lady who developed the oddball LCD. Now she's famous, her display is famous, and she got what she came for, so she quit the project to commercialize her invention.
Negroponte has a weirdo idea that if you give poor kids laptops with internet access, they'll just automatically learn a lot, rather than dick around and be distracted from their studies and chores. This hasn't been demonstrated, nor does it seem especially plausible since one-laptop-per-student has been tried in western schools and found basically useless, it's just an idea he really likes. He wants third-world governments to pump billions of dollars from their meagre education budgets into a mass experiment along these lines on their children.
Sure, it might be a waste of money, and the kids might not actually learn as much as if that money was spent on books and teachers, but hey, it's a risk he's willing to take! (after all, he won't be suffering any of the consequences)
Welcome to the grown-up world where people do "charity" work to advance their own agendas.
And kids? Kids who are given a pretty green computer, just for them, with a little kid-sized keyboard, by an enthusiastic adult? Of course they're excited to have it.
You're only talking about enthusiasm, not results. If you don't know the difference, you should shut your whore mouth when the men are talking. First, you say that all tried and failed before. Well, their problem. Someone has to fail, before other comes in, analyses all faults previously done, and try to do it differently. And OLPC seems to try to do that differently. Everything they do seems to be kinda logical to me. "seems to try to do that differently" "seems kind a logical"
Notice what's missing? DEMONSTRATED UTILITY
It is absolutely irresponsible to go to poor countries with educational problems, and make them pay huge sums to subject their children to a large scale experiment.
The sane thing, the adult thing to do would be to run this experimentally for 4 years in a few dozen classes before attempting mass production. If they don't show consistent, major results after 4 years, in helping kids to learn the basic subjects that are lacking in these educationally-challenged countries, then it should be back to the drawing board. This "Hey, let's jump into mass deployment!" idiocy is criminal.
Why is this XO "for 3rd world kids" and not just "for kids"?
The answer is simple: it's not just supposed to be a learning supplement, it's not for learning about computers. It's supposed to substitute for things like paper textbooks, proper classrooms, access to libraries, and competent, reliable teachers.
This type of technology has never been demonstrated as sufficient for that. Never.
They built a fucking gamepad into the thing! And the kids are somehow not supposed to fuck around waste time on it, but instead study difficult subjects? Hah!
Hah!