Former OLPC CTO Aims to Create $75 Laptop

theodp writes "Mary Lou Jepsen, who left her One Laptop Per Child CTO gig on Dec. 31st, has reemerged with her sights set on a $75 laptop that will be designed by her new company, Pixel Qi, which is described as a 'spin-out' from OLPC. In a Groklaw interview, Jepsen calls for 'a $50-75 laptop in the next 2-3 years' and says it's time to go Crazy-Eddie on touchscreen prices as well." This is probably good news to Bruce Perens, who thinks that the recent report of Microsoft's dual-boot XO project (with Windows as well as the Linux-based Sugar OS) is a feint driven by Microsoft's fear of "the entire third world learning Linux as children." Update: 01/10 21:22 GMT by T : ChelleChelle adds a link to an excellent interview with Jepsen in the ACM Queue, in which she discusses OLPC and some of the technologies it contains.

Comments

If we're going to go that cheap...

[suprcvic]

Why not just send all the kids TI-89's and teach them how to program those. I can't imagine anybody creating a PC of any worth for less than the cost of a graphing calculator.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Ironsides]

I was thinking along similar lines. But an 89 still costs over $100. How do they plan to make a computer for less than a calculator costs?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[0100010001010011]

By not taking as much of a profit as TI does?

They were a bit over $100 when I got mine 6 years ago. Do you honestly think they haven't done any R&D in the last 6 years to cut prices down? The whole thing could probably be done on a single chip now.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Hatta]

That just shows you how overpriced graphing calculators are. Don't you think the prices should have dropped a bit more in the past 10 years? I guess when every HS student across the country has to buy one for their college prep classes there's not much incentive to compete on price.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[snoyberg]

And the worst part is that TI has a virtual monopoly on this; for many standardized exams you have to use one of their calculators. Talk about stifling competition.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Quadraginta]

Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week? Doubt that would cost more than $75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan.

E. F. Schumacher wrote an interesting and provocative book (Small is Beautiful) several decades ago about the routinely inappropriate "help" the First World often sends the Third. To grossly oversummarize, it's like we see someone painfully hauling a load of firewood down a dirt road in a poor country and decide to "help" by giving him a hybrid-electric pick-up truck. Of course, he has no good supply of gas, no way to maintain such a complex machine, no good roads to drive it on...and a mule would be a lot more appropriate and helpful.

It's hard not to wonder whether a focus on supplying cheap laptop computers is fully appropriate for kids whose principal problems probably lie more in the areas of crappy public hygiene, rampant preventable infectious childhood disease, AIDS and its consequences (e.g. becoming an orphan), civil unrest and insecurity, not to mention oppression in many places, and their parents not being able to get decent jobs close to home.

Maybe a Linux laptop at the right price point is a silver bullet for some of this nasty stuff, somehow, although I don't quite see it. I guess we'll find out.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[zippthorne]

There's nothing a graphing calculator can do on a test question that you couldn't do faster with a regular scientific calculator and some clever thinking. They're not only overpriced, they're a crutch that directly hinders college prep classes.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[stuporglue]

An 89 costs $100ish retail, I'd guess that TI has already made back their R&D costs and is now making quite a bit of profit on those things. Also, I think the market for computers is bigger than that of graphing calculators.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Carnildo]

Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week? Doubt that would cost more than $75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan.

$75 per child might get you a school library of a couple thousand books, but wouldn't you rather give them all of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[CodeBuster]

You can use the HP graphing calculator instead, you just have to know how to use it. In fact, from what I have heard the HP calculators dominate in the actual engineering working world while the TI calculators are mostly limited to education. That ought to tell you something about the relative usefulness of HP calculators compared to TI.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[boris111]

Around 2000 I remember buying my graphing calculator at Kmart for $50. It wasn't their nicest calculator, but it got me through all of college. I ended resorting to my cheaper and smaller Scientific calculator most of the time anyway and kept the graphing as a back up.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[CodeBuster]

They have legitimate uses, particularly when the calculator is being used for custom programs (and who buys one these days if they don't intend to use the programming features?). It would be really annoying to have to scan through a program one line at a time to find and make a tweak or what if you want to display multiple outputs simultaneously? The large screen combined with programming features is really a winning combination, the graphing tools are just a nice bonus.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Goaway]

How about we don't let your failure of imagination hold the rest of us back, hmm? If that's all the same with you?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

Fact is giving cheap computers to "poor" nations does not make them any happier, healthier, richer, or more educated. It just means that they have cheap computers. It may change the social dynamics around a bit, like reading a book at home on a computer instead of at the local school or library. It may even mean that somebody may get to work for IBM as a programmer through one of their off-shoring initiatives.

At any rate, since computers started to become superfluous in the West I have NOT noticed that people became more educated, happy, employed, etc (I'm sure those ppl still making big $$$ in the IT field would disagree). Yep, a shift in jobs for some people, and easier to do some second-hand research; but overall (unless you are a Gamer) I wouldn't say it has had a dramatic effect (for the better) on people's lives.

Don't get me wrong, I am certainly in favour of cheap computers, especially for poor people, but people should realize WHY they want this, and the reality of their ideals.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Kadin2048]

I was thinking along similar lines. But an 89 still costs over $100. How do they plan to make a computer for less than a calculator costs? Perhaps by not trying to charge $100 for something that was barely state-of-the-art ten years ago, and depending on their monopoly position in the market to ensure that people pony up?

The TI calculators are a prime example of how a market can stagnate when there's no competition. Pretty much since HP abandoned the educational market (which struck me as a bad idea, given how the professional market is getting eaten up by computer software packages) TI has rested on its laurels. Sure, every once in a while they toss out an incremental upgrade -- a little more RAM or Flash here, a little better screen there -- but by and large they're not doing a damn thing with their lineup, and they haven't decreased the prices much at all.

The TI-89 isn't bad -- it's probably the best handheld calculator out there, depending on how you feel about the HP-49 series -- but I can't help but wonder what we'd have if TI actually had some motivation to actually turn out a new model and cut prices every year or so, like the rest of the computer-hardware industry.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Hatta]

But if we didn't have programmable graphing calculators how would I have kept from going insane from the boredom of High School math? I swear, going over 20 questions of simple math problems on the board, problems I understood and did right the first time so the review was absolutely no value to me, well that would be enough to drive me right out of my mind without TI-83 drug wars or breakout.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Kadin2048]

At any rate, since computers started to become superfluous in the West I have NOT noticed that people became more educated, happy, employed, etc (I'm sure those ppl still making big $$$ in the IT field would disagree). Yep, a shift in jobs for some people, and easier to do some second-hand research; but overall (unless you are a Gamer) I wouldn't say it has had a dramatic effect (for the better) on people's lives. I'm not sure whether there's been much of a real "happiness" benefit (although I have no idea how you'd really quantify happiness -- "how happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 10"?), but computers have contributed real productivity gains to the U.S. economy, which in general have helped to expand purchasing power. Plus there are a lot of fringe benefits. (Probably far exceeding the real productivity gains, which are difficult to measure and engender lots of argument based on the methodology.)

Joe Worker may not care much about 'computers' either way, but he can now make long distance phone calls for a fraction of what they cost a few decades ago. I suspect within a generation, the idea of "long distance" phone calls being different from "local" ones will probably be lost on the young, if it hasn't been already. And there are cellphones, which except for very rural areas I don't think you can say haven't had an impact.

And even beyond that, there's all the goods that you can buy down at your local MegaMart or even grocery store. One of the only reasons you can buy so much cheap stuff from halfway around the globe is because of logistics and supply chains that have been honed to razor-thin margins by computer models, managed using computers, and operated over information networks. Huge amounts of global trade are only feasible because of computerization. And that doesn't even get into the personal-communication and leisure activities that are only possible because of them.

Of course, some people will always argue that technology and development haven't done anything to promote "happiness," and perhaps we'd all be better off if we'd never developed agriculture in the first place. But to me, that represents a lot of second-guessing (from the very cushy armchair of modern civilization) of decisions made by our long-dead ancestors, who have felt at every step of the way that new technologies were a benefit and chose to implement them.

So: will giving computers to poor nations necessarily make them happier? I've no idea. I also don't know if it necessarily will make them richer or more educated -- that really has more to do with how the computers are used, than the computers themselves. But without computers they're going to be kept out of a vast amount of the economy, and that will almost certainly assure that they're poor. They aren't a guarantee of anything, but they seem quite absolutely necessary as a starting condition to have much of a shot at all.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

$75 per child might get you a school library of a couple thousand books, but wouldn't you rather give them all of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg? That's not the point. It's the naivety and ethnocentrism which Quadraginta is pointing out.

For example, can you tell me what the negative consequences are of sending laptops to, let's say, Nigeria?

Or, can you tell me the relevance of having access to the complete works of Wikipedia versus getting Polio vaccinations, or vitamin supplements?

Can you tell me that these computers will actually even get into the hands of the "poor" people, or will this just be treated the same as food-aide by the man-made famines in Africa, where the governments, warlords, etc, take the food and resells it to the highest bidder.

I really doubt most people think beyond there own simple perspectives, and hence people like Quadraginta get modded down simply because people do not understand what he/she is saying, so they just assume that person is being a Troll, etc.

I'm sure a lot of people are assuming that I'm against OLPC simply because I bring up these common-sense points. Of course that could be farthest from the truth.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[wpiman]

The $100 OLPC initiative was start when $100 was worth substantially more. It they have gone with a 100 Euro laptops, they could really trick the thing out.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

but computers have contributed real productivity gains to the U.S. economy Perhaps I didn't explain well enough, but when I was talking about "computers", I was talking in the vain of Personal Computers, and NOT computers used in industry. I was really meaning personal computers like the OLPC computers discussed in the article. Personal computers that are used in home and in school.

I was not talking about large mainframe computers, telephones switching systems, industrial robots, etc. And I wanted to emphasize the AVERAGE person, and not the entrepreneurs, for example. Sorry for not making myself clearer. Obviously I make assumptions too; but I try not too. I hope I made myself clear on what I was talking about.

Sincerely,
ULTW

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[bberens]

$75 per child in desperately-poor Thirdworldistan Yes, most assuredly. It's a good thing that desperately-poor Thirdworldistan isn't the target market for this device.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[The Faywood Assassin]

$75 per child might get you a school library of a couple thousand books, but wouldn't you rather give them all of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg?

So they can connect to what internet? This is the exact kind of lack of planning some commenters are talking about.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

The TI-89 is not $150 worth of hardware, it's a $20 calculator bundled with a $130 mathematics software package. Linux has no licensing cost, so the price comparison is meaningless.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure those ppl still making big $$$ in the IT field would disagree Yeah, all those techs working for $6-$7 per hour at the local mom-and-pop shops would totally disagree with you. What? That's not big money? Maybe you should step down off your soap-box, then, and take another look at the situation.

Since we're talking about the IT field, let's discuss jobs. All these shiny new cheapo computers are gonna need people. People who know how to use them, and can teach others. People who know how to diagnose and repair them, and can teach others. People in the IT field. People who (just like is already happening with phone support) will work for peanuts, just to have a job, so they can feed their families.

I'm as incensed as the rest of you guys about the outsourcing of drudge jobs, given to unintelligible foreigners who somehow manage to read from a script just as well as the unintelligible locals, but this is an opportunity for a giant leap forward for these developing nations, and I say we should give them every opportunity to become just as screwed-up and technology-dependent as the rest of us. Here's to advancing the human race... ... just look what "firewater" and smallpox did for the Native Americans.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

But without computers they're going to be kept out of a vast amount of the economy, and that will almost certainly assure that they're poor. They aren't a guarantee of anything, but they seem quite absolutely necessary as a starting condition to have much of a shot at all. This is a rather bizarre thing to say, especially since you offer ZERO evidence for this statement. If you are talking about introducing technologies to people... then this has historically led to poverty and social and economic stratification of a society. It may or may not introduce them to the world economy in some marginal sense.. but if it does, they will likely experience the results of exploitation rather than quality-of-life improvements. One could argue rather bogus economic concepts like Standard of Living, or GDP, (they're bogus in THIS context because they are Western measures of a Western market economy)... Standard of Living, for example is merely an equation that involves GDP.... So you have a whole lot of faulty assumptions like the US has a really high Standard of Living because they spend so much on War and Natural disasters which in turn causes there GDP (spending) to go up and hence their Standard of Living equation has improved. Really bogus in the sense that the quality of life for most poor and many middle class people in Western countries, but in particular the US really sucks BIG TIME. So no, even in the US having the likes of Quad-core gaming machines hasn't necessarily decreased poverty (in fact I think poverty in the US has increased with processor speed... but I'd need to verify that).

Regards,
UTW

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[HeavyAl]

It may change the social dynamics around a bit

You shot yourself in the foot with that single statement. Social dynamics is what DRIVES technology. Why do we have cell phones at all? Why are iPhones such a big deal? Is it just because of convenience? I tend to think thats not the case - as it stands a great bit of the technology we employ in our daily lives is actually inconvenient, taking time to recharge, load with information, then worry about breakage, theft, etc - But what keeps us interested in that technology? It's the fact that some company comes out with a great new toy that our brother/sister/buddy/houseguest just has to have and it becomes a matter of keeping up with the Jones', as it were.

We are social creatures by nature (yes, even the introverted /. crowd). Whatever allows us more social interactivity is what sells and keeps us coming back for more. By implementing such structures in a third world country we are laying the framework for these people to learn more about what drives them - their social interaction. Once they start to find out how much more socially plugged in they can be then they will have been caught, hook line and sinker - I know it sounds like a bad spin on things but it's not necessarily - there has to be balance in all things. But the point is that social dynamics is where the growth of todays technologies start and by giving these countries a leg up on this technology we've equipped them to drive themselves into the next generation of social and technical excellence.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[TehZorroness]

If you teach a man to fish, he won't be hungry for the rest of his life. We can give these people food. That's fine. The only problem is we'll need to make another shipment tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Or, we can attempt to give life to their economy, educate their youth, and hopefully make them able to support themselves someday. Many robber barons of the guilded age (those with money in their pockets) donated things such as libraries instead of just paying everyone's bills. This is what the OLPC project is doing.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think there is a nearby local library in Nigerian villages? By the way, the XO comes with a library of books in the computer.

But turn it around to yourself: how about you can't have or use a computer ever again, but you can use pencil and paper and get a book from the nearby library once a week instead? Happy?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh please.

Did you see the countries buying these? Last I checked Uraguay is a lovely nation, one of the richer ones in South America. There's no civil strife. There's no AIDS madness. They aren't starving. However it's also good for the poorer areas (in Africa especially), teaching a family in some of the poorer reaches of the world to farm better, check forcasts, see what the government is doing, etc.

An XO-1 is a great way to help with someone's education. Just because the fat losers in North America sit around all day on MySpace listening to gangster rap doesn't mean a computer can't help with someone's education. I have a friend who's a budding astronomer; thanks to communities and sources online, he's now got charts and a guide to buying a telescope. I learnt about the "chinook" effect yesterday, explaining why it's been warm lately in lovely Ottawa.

But who am I to oppose you? I'm sure dumping food in peoples' laps is better than teaching them how to make it.

Do you want to know what that leads to? Nothing. You don't solve world poverty by dumping all our ressources at the poor. You "solve" world poverty by pushing everyone forward, by teaching. When people over yonder can figure out how to start farming properly, how to give themselves the nutrients we need, they won't need our help. They'll soon be shooting far and wide, and will be self-sufficient.

With computers they can easily learn how to properly care for some animals, how to help fight diseases too. There goes your AIDS, there goes your starvation, there goes your uneducated. But of course this is Slashdot.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Beardo the Bearded]

I'm an Engineer.

I was not allowed to use a programmable or graphing calculator on any exams. I used a Sharp EL-546 for my scholastic career. It was about $25. For that, I got matrix solutions, simpson's rule, algebraic substitution, polar and rectangular vector calculations, stats, function recall (so you can go back) and a bunch of other goodies.

At work, I do not use a "graphing" calculator. I use that old sharp (or calc.exe) for the few minor calculations that I have to do. For anything else, I use the simulation programs on the computer.

Really, who uses a calculator for anything important? You get the right tool for the job. As far as I'm concerned, using a graphing calculator instead of a sim (or RW tests) is the same as using a wristwatch.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly we need them because people like me have never heard you complain before. I am so much richer for the experience.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

But who am I to oppose you? I have no idea why you or anybody else would want to oppose me.

You don't solve world poverty by dumping all our resources at the poor. You "solve" world poverty by pushing everyone forward, by teaching. When people over yonder can figure out how to start farming properly, how to give themselves the nutrients we need, they won't need our help. They'll soon be shooting far and wide, and will be self-sufficient. "You don't solve world poverty by dumping all our resources at the poor."
Yes of course... There are many thousands of other ways you do not solve world poverty.

You "solve" world poverty by pushing everyone forward, by teaching. Interesting, but how does teaching somebody about the "chinook" effect , for example solve world poverty.

When people over yonder can figure out how to start farming properly, how to give themselves the nutrients we need, they won't need our help. That is just racist tripe. People do not need the White Western Corporation to teach them how to properly feed themselves. They need the Western Corporation to stop funding corrupt governments and insurgent groups, and preferably spending some time and money giving the land back to the people that these technologically superior "farmers" took from them. Maybe that would help to solve the poverty issues in much of Africa, Asia and South America.

It really offends me when people who have no knowledge of the world make up their own theories about how other people should live.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[rtb61]

There are tens of millions of children who exist in the first and second world who cannot afford anything but a $75 dollar laptop. Are you saying because there a starving children in the third world, that poor children in the first and second world should just STFU and prepare for a job in the food service industry, a production line or as a fawning servant.

For once and for all drop the bullshit that the OLPC is only about third world children there are plenty of children on the wrong side of the digital divide in the rest of the world and the OLPC is also about them. As for the third world, what the fuck stops you from doing both, helping them with their current problems and providing them with knowledge so they can have a future with out them.

Nothing beats corporate for profit marketing, absolutely nothing, slime as low as it can go.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[wraithgar]

Thanks to inflation, keeping the product at the same cost over time means prices HAVE been "cut down".

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[aproposofwhat]

Or, can you tell me the relevance of having access to the complete works of Wikipedia versus getting Polio vaccinations, or vitamin supplements?

Call me an idealist, but thinking in the longer term, having an educated population with the capability to compete on more level terms with the developed world is relevant.

Yes, there are immediate health problems in the developing world, and it would be nice to see them solved, but solving those problems in isolation does nothing to enable the people involved to generate wealth and improve their situation in the longer term.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

Educational and hobbiest computers help drive an understanding and thirst for applying computing technology in other applications. Or are you expecting all these technical advances to always come from outside the countries that could benefit from them?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

Call me an idealist, but thinking in the longer term, having an educated population with the capability to compete on more level terms with the developed world is relevant. You didn't seem to understand my reply. Perhaps I was not articulate enough. My point was more in the realm of Planning and Management; which involves, among other things, figuring out the pros and cons. I can only surmise that people who have a technology fixation have a very limited and unrealistic perspective. You seem to be making a false assumption that I am against OLPC, which I am not.

I think one thing that can be said however, is that computer technology does not make people smarter. It is a GREAT tool to have, and I wish everybody would have one, but it does not make people smart, and it will not solve poverty in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or 5th worlds. The personal computer is over-rated in the personal "productivity" area.

I have pretty much explained this in my various posts to this thread (so I will not repeat myself here). You may if you wish, consult the latest posts on my Homepage if you wish: (http://slashdot.org/~unlametheweak/)

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[uniquename72]

My thoughts exactly. Yes, we could (and should) just cure their diseases and feed them and help them grow crops. That will help them rise to the level of our servants -- growing our food for us, and maybe assembling the toys our children play with.

But giving them technology when they have little else should be a big leap towards competing directly with U.S. industry, rather than being slaves to it. Of course, maybe they'll just wind up manning call centers and growing a middle class until tech manufacturers move on to the next 3rd world country willing to work for (relative) peanuts. But maybe they'll create the next tech boom, removing Westerners from of creative dominance in technology.

At its heart, this is a massive social experiment, and I'm excited to see how it turns out. (Of course this all sounds very elitist, because it is!)

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

Educational and hobbyist computers help drive an understanding and thirst for applying computing technology in other applications. Or are you expecting all these technical advances to always come from outside the countries that could benefit from them? I have no expectations, but in this case they are coming from "outside" countries. And in all probability they always will. I have yet to see a semi-conductor company build a chip fabrication plant in Canada, so I doubt if I would see one in a politically volatile area like central Africa. Right here where I live (in the "developed" world, I know many computer Geeks who are un / under-employed... not much good it did them for employment anyways.

Yeah I guess I'm pretty old school. I don't believe technology is a panacea to world hunger, or educating third world kids with computers so they can get jobs as Mechanical Turks doing captcha's for spammers and crackers; is necessarily a good thing that will improve their quality of life.

Yes, there quality of life COULD be improved, but considering the unconsidered posts to this thread, it seems like more regard will be placed on the technological "solution" than to the people.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[mr_mischief]

What phone are they going to use to reserve the book? With what light will they read it after the sun goes down? How are they going to travel 100 miles on foot to the "local library"?

Many of the people targeted with the XO are not living in clean rows of houses with white fences but with no computers. They're living in places where subsistence farming and odd jobs are the employment. They're happy to have clean water and vaccinations, some clothes and maybe some shoes. You don't send these people to the local school library, where there might be 5 books for the village in the one-room school. If they're going to read, a free computer and free content like Project Gutenberg is great. If they're going to write, a free computer is great since paper and pencil is a major expense for some people.

Imagine putting 30 computers in a small village that has one phone for those 30 kids and their families. Now, imagine all the computers can talk to one another, and that another, coordinating charity is putting a 256k or 512k Internet line in for the village. You're talking about not just changing the source of connectivity and reading material. You're talking about introducing those things.

Sure, some of the kids targeted have it better than this. Many don't. You should watch or read the news story on the village in Cambodia where Negroponte gave away a dozen or two regular laptops to the village school, and enrollment in first grade increased by half.

Countries targeted include those in which 50% of children live with no access to schools at all. Where do they go for their books?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, we'd probably have TI's that broke after a couple years use, or crashed half the time, or displayed invalid results. Sorry, but I'd rather have a little more dependability out of my calculator. I bought a TI-86 in first year university (in 1999), as required for calculus (only used it for reimann sums). It was probably about the best purchase I ever made for a university course. Did me a lot better than most of my textbooks. IT was useful in a lot of courses. And I still use it quite often, even though I'm out of school. The nice big display works great when you're adding up a lot of numbers so you can do a spot check to make sure you haven't mistyped something.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

The third world isn't all jungle and half-naked people, you know? I live in Argentina, in my city a 1Mbit connection is now the standard broadband connection, dialup is terribly rare, so most people go to cybercafes or have broadband at home. But just about 30 minutes from downtown there is a small town/neighbourhood that is very poor, most kids hadn't seen an open computer in their lives till I showed them one in a special class, the school's computers no longer work due to lack of funds, and normal computers need servicing way too often. A rugged computer (XO) running a rugged OS (Linux) would be great for them. I'm unsure if they can get a 1Mbit connection at the school, but worst case scenario, a wireless connection would be feasible (it's less than 20km, maybe just 10, from downtown). They would GREATLY benefit from the XO laptop, right now we're just trying to get them pentium 1-3 computers (ie, other people's 'junk').

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former employee of TI I can ensure you that TI does in fact make extremely good profits on calculators. I think their desired comfort range is somewhere in the 400-600% range. If you compare a TI calculator to an equivalent or better Casio calculator, they typically cost a lot more.

However due to their monopoly and influence over school calculator choices and rules for calculators in tests, they can keep this huge profit and still have 99% of the market. They actually try to, and successfully do, change / mold rules to ensure the competitions products have features that are disallowed on tests. Teachers also greatly affects the choice of calculators (basically it's mandated by the school). If this isn't a monopoly with questionable business practices, I don't know what is.

I should perhaps clarify that the information in this post was mentioned in meetings by higher ups. One of the reason a project I was working on was canceled was that it couldn't really be sold at the kind of margin they are used to.

I unfortunately do not feel comfortable posting this with my account name exposed.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

What phone are they going to use to reserve the book? With what light will they read it after the sun goes down? How are they going to travel 100 miles on foot to the "local library"? I don't know.

Many of the people targeted with the XO are not living in clean rows of houses with white fences but with no computers. They're living in places where subsistence farming and odd jobs are the employment. They're happy to have clean water and vaccinations, some clothes and maybe some shoes. I presumed that these computers would probably be targeted at subsistence farmers, amongst others.

You don't send these people to the local school library, where there might be 5 books for the village in the one-room school. I would not send them anywhere. I also would certainly not discourage people from going to the library, however far away it may be.

Imagine putting 30 computers in a small village that has one phone for those 30 kids and their families. Now, imagine all the computers can talk to one another, and that another, coordinating charity is putting a 256k or 512k Internet line in for the village. You're talking about not just changing the source of connectivity and reading material. You're talking about introducing those things. The "charity" you speak of is almost ALWAYS pure racism and colonialism. Of course I cannot speak for the OLPC or every project I hear about... but it sounds more like colonialism than it does about helping them. The concept of "Poverty" and wealth itself may be very different in those communities. Of course, generally speaking most of the "poverty" that indigenous people's have suffered from are the result of "charity".

I'm having the feeling that NOBODY on Slashdot has EVER read a history book, an Economics book, or any Social Science book what-so-ever. I am not saying you are WRONG about anything... but at the very least I am highly skeptical. I am sorry that more people are not... skepticism helps stop people from making mistakes; and helps people to think through solutions more diligently.

Yeah I can imagine a room full of poor natives talking to each other in a room full of OLPC computers... That reminds me of an article I read (can't remember... but it was a real life article in a University Library)... about some tribe that was "discovered" in South America. They took this tribe to the big city... flew them in their military jets... really treated them like Kings and Queens, and showed them how superior they were and that they wanted to civilize and educate them to be part of their world. This uncivilized tribe that was living hand-to-mouth subsistence in the jungles of South America basically said no thanks and went back to being poor hunters and gatherers. I can't remember the tribe.... and I really haven't been following those issues for years (it depresses me too much)... but I know, most people make it sound good to destroy people's way of living and force them to work as cheap labour on lands that they once owned.... Yeah I guess most people on Slashdot think I'm some fucked up creature. So be it.. It's just my two cents...

Regards,
UTW

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[rbanffy]

Somehow I doubt the TI-89 costs more than $75 to build.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Or why not just make sure they all get their vaccinations, a good supply of pencils and paper, and an interesting book to read from the nearby library each week?"

Dude - they don't have a library!

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[FlightlessParrot]

Well, books would cost, probably, an average of USD$20 each. A year's supply would cost $1000 for 50 kids. Depreciation? You'd be lucky to get 3 years from the sort of use you might expect. Then there's the cost of that "near-by" library; if it really is a desperately poor country (which is, of course, as everyone KEEPS ON SAYING, 88**NOT**88 the target for OLPC), that library doesn't exist. So you factor in that, and the cost of money for the books and the library. Then you need to fund the transport, and the administration, which bloats by the laws of educational administration everywhere. I don't know the figures, but you'd be lucky to do minimal text delivery for $20 per year. Just as a replacement for dead trees, a really cheap digital device starts looking pretty cost-effective, when you think of the range of material already available, and that could become available, for essentially no cost. Over the years, the Media Lab has done a lot of gee-whiz grandstanding, but this idea looks pretty good, and if the price can be brought down further, then you go, Mary Lou.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[ZorbaTHut]

I've never had my DS, PSP, XBox 360, PS2, Wii, or Gamecube crash. Ever. And I've used each one of those systems more than I've ever used a graphing calculator . . . and curiously enough, I have had my TI-81 crash. Lost all its saved data too.

Modern technology doesn't imply frequent crashing. Modern technology and complex code doesn't even imply frequent crashing. I have no doubt that you could build a cheap graphing calculator on a 400mhz XScale chip, with maybe 128mb of storage, with a full GUI and a hierarchical filesystem, just as stable as they used to be.

Probably based on Linux.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[pinkocommie]

like reading a book at home on a computer instead of at the local school or library
Heh I grew up in Pakistan, not exactly the most impoverished of nations and the largest city has one large scale public library (there are local ones in high-end areas that cater to local neighborhood residents).
In order to read say a 3 investigators novel in middle/elemntary school I had to fork over 10 cents / day to a local private library. The household income at this point was in the range of 200 dollars (6k rupees) a month on which a family of 7 lived. And we were considered middle class. In comparison buying a new (pirated) book was around a dollar with a 'genuine' copy being around 6 dollars.
As you may guess even renting books from the local library was not exactly affordable in great quantities.
Far more relevant though, is back in the day my school had computer programming classes (BASIC) which I was virtually flunking, the whole thing seemed completely alien to me. A generous uncle bought us our first computer and my grades went from 50/100 to 99/100 and stayed in that range. I'm now earning well above the middle class in the US as a software engineer. For every person like me that actually got access to a computer and was able to leverage that there are probably hundreds if not thousands that were smarter then me and didn't. Imagine the potential lost, regardless of which field of study you think of.
imnsho this is a brilliant idea provided the likes of small minded governments and Intel don't completely screw it over.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[mrbcs]

At any rate, since computers started to become superfluous in the West I have NOT noticed that people became more educated, happy, employed, etc

Well.. I'm more educated, happier and self employed etc. since computers are superfluous in western Canada! I'm a self employed geek that can see the mountains everyday and live in a small safe community with my wife and four kids.

A bad day of computer geeking is better than a great day of welding!

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Quadraginta]

how about you can't have or use a computer ever again, but you can use pencil and paper and get a book from the nearby library once a week instead?

You're describing how I lived all through college and graduate school, and most of my post-doc training. The first computer I had on my own desk came with my first faculty appointment when I was 32 years old.

Happy?

Obviously I would be. Maybe it's a generational thing. Since widely-networked computers didn't appear in my life until I was already middle-aged, I tend to use them strictly for work purposes, and they just more or less speed up what I would ordinarily do by trotting on down to the library or doing some phoning around. To be sure, my work would probably slow down, but since everyone else's work would, too, I wouldn't be at any competitive disadvantage, so I wouldn't be very upset. I wouldn't be reading blogs, but then I'd just go back to reading the newspaper. I wouldn't be posting to /. but then probably both you and I, as well as my family and employer, would consider that a good thing...

But I think for a younger generation -- like my teenagers -- networked computers serve a profoundly important social purpose, and they, indeed, would be miserable without them.

All this proves is that we get very used to what we know, and can't imagine doing without it. But it's a grave mistake to project your expectations of "normal" and "necessary" onto someone -- like a kid in a poor Andes mountain village -- who has utterly different experiences. If you really want to help him, you need to first understand him, and that means clearing your mind of the unconscious prejudices you have about what is "normal" and "necessary" because of the way you have lived.

I'm not criticizing you per se. I doubt I could do any better, figuring out how best to help out some poor kid in Nigeria. It's damn hard to get into someone else's head and see out through his eyes.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Quadraginta]

I'm sorry, but your economic argument suggesting that laptops trump paper books for cheap delivery of information is while clever wildly delusional. No way, no how. We'll start with the fact that the marginal cost of a book is way less than $20 -- probably less than 25 cents -- that, with moderate care in its printing and use, it will easily last a century, and that it draws zero watts and can be repaired with Scotch tape by unskilled operators.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Quadraginta]

Goodness, of course not. If I made a careful list of those thousand books, I could gather together nearly all of what's great and useful and inspiring about Western Civilization for the past two thousand years. Anyone who read them all would be magnificently educated.

The available online electronic resources are pathetic by comparison. I mean, Wikipedia is great for pop culture references, and handy for facts 'n' figures that everyone knows exists but would be a pain to go look up somewhere. But you can't learn chemistry or general relativity from it (at least not at anything more than a casual amateur level), nor plumb the causes for the decline of the Roman Empire, or follow along with Madison's arguments for the Constitution, or understand from contemporary poetry and fiction the lure the American West exerted on early 19th century Americans, and how that has affected us today.

I suspect you're just taking for granted a whole crapload of culture and education that you soaked up from your environment, and in school, that was generally conveyed by the hundreds of books you've read. Reading is so ubiquitous, like breathing, that you forget how much of it you do in the modern world. A child raising with nothing but the Wikipedia (or some such) would make a most incomplete, weird adult.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[aproposofwhat]

I never said that a laptop makes you smarter - various salesmen of my acquaintance give the lie to that assertion :P.

What cheap laptops and internet connectivity will do for developing countries is to give the already smart kids in those countries the opportunity to benefit from freely available educational resources - it is the access to information that I see as key to empowering people.

Yes - I do have a narrow perspective - it's called 'thinking in the long term'. From that perspective, enabling developing countries to compete in the services and information markets and thereby allow them to use the wealth generated to provide sustainable healthcare, improved education and infrastructure is a good thing - short term healthcare or food aid is very worthy, but has little or no long term benefit (and can conceivably have a net defecit - population increases leading to pressure on food, water and other resources for example).

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[FlightlessParrot]

I don't know the marginal cost of a book, precisely, depends on a lot of variables, but it's certainly *way* more than 25c -- that's maybe the marginal cost of a CD.

Books regularly used by kids don't last a century. And you've got to allow for accidental loss and destruction, and deliberate theft -- wherever books are used (did you actually buy every book on your shelves? I've got one or two I never returned).

Maybe a laptop is overkill for pure text delivery. But have you priced memory recently? Know how many metres worth of book shelves you can get into a Gig? And a monochrome LCD display is pretty cheap. Replacement of books is a significant financial part of the value of a cheap device.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[ardin,mcallister]

Hear Hear!
I used to write programs to show my work, because I was sick of dealing with listening to the teacher complain about me not showing my work.
I see it this way: If I understand the equation enough to write a program to show all the work, with near 100% accuracy on the work part, its not cheating. Now, if I gave the program to a friend, then He'd be cheating. Same if I downloaded it off the net.

-Ardin

PS: TI-86 had better games than the old GameBoys, sometimes. and if you really knew what you were doing, you could keep them even after a teacher rips your batteries out in an attempt to erase your memory.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Richy_T]

Not everywhere shares a Western reverence for books. Books are somewhat fragile and it's hard to hide a library when a neighboring warlord comes rampaging through.

Rich

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

I wasn't going to reply to this post until I noticed you got modded Insightful. Though I do appreciate your post, I think now is the time to inform.

First point I'll make is that anecdotal evidence is pretty much unconsidered here on Slash (I know this fact intimately... as I always get blasted for it). Of course it's not completely worthless, and can be informative.

Second point is having cheap computers will not make going to the local library any easier or cheaper. Nor will computers (cheap or otherwise) solve the social and political problems in Pakistan or elsewhere that you speak of.

Third point is having cheap computers does not increase ones grade point average. Again anecdotal evidence does not mean cause and effect. One could use the comparison of Japan vs the USA: Japan does not rely on computers for teaching as compared to the USA, but Japanese students always do better in school than US students.

Fourth point:
Computers do NOT increase employability. What computers do (as used as educational instruments) is increase the rate of educational inflation.

Fifth point:
The introduction of these cheap educational computers will only help level the socio-economic playing field ONLY if EVERYBODY in the community got them, otherwise it will just increase social stratification... much like with the libraries in the rich neighbourhoods in Pakistan.

Of course, I fully expect the political zealots to help their agenda by claiming or implying that I am against cheap computers or the OLPC which is of course not the case. What I am against is faulty assumptions and bad logic. Yes, the type of Logic that Managers and Administrators and Politicians and the like use everyday.

As someone who was in the top 5 percent of my class, who spent 3 years and BIG time bucks going to a modern Western school to learn programming and IT... I can assure you that education plays VERY little in actually getting a job. The closest thing I ever got to IT was doing VERY lame phone support... and the people who became the Managers were the same thoughtless illogical people who just barely passed their courses in school, but can get Insightful ratings on their Slashdot accounts and employment reviews. Nope... computers cannot solve social issues. Period!

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[pinkocommie]

First point: Anecdotal evidence of course is largely meaningless, just that it seemed to me to mirror what the OLPC guys are targetting.

Second point: I never mentioned their capacity for solving any social issues. Nor will it fix the library issues, what it will do is allow people without access to 'google' (provided they get the mesh working of course) and get information, it will also allow one to access stuff like project gutenberg and participate in online discussion forums (say for understanding a physics concept that one's teacher is particularly ill equipped at). Again not saying there aren't other avenues just that the available avenues will expand dramatically

Third Point: I think your missing the point. Having a computer won't do diddly squat, heck even I started off massively gaming. But being able to cut down the cost of acquiring books to near zero will help a lot. Being able to see animations of say bio stuff (how the heart pumps blood etc etc) will allow people to understand stuff better , pique and retain their interest. It's simply a tool to lower cost and increase the amount of information available. Whether it's used @ all or wasted is obviously up to the individual using it.

Fourth Point: I haven't read much about it nor have you provided anything actually backing up what you said? Especially don't get how computers have anything to do with it except perhaps increasing the total pool of smart people out there.

Fifth Point: Again no one is saying they'll solve social issues, they'll just make it easier for people to get educated. There may be spin-off effects of more people being educated. If you go to Pakistan for example and talk about democracy the average person will talk about voting, ask them about the need for checks and balances? The importance of institutions and you'll draw a blank stare, if perhaps a certain percentage read up on democracy that would shift (again not saying that will happen, just making a point that unintended positive consequences of education exist).

I was among the top 0.3 percent of my class (we have a city-wide exam with 50K candidates, I was among the top 150). Highly probable that I would've made something of myself, maybe not computer related but the point I was making was that it piqued my interest, was able to engage me with that subject and eventually gave me the tools to excel in it.
On a slightly related note, I knew other kids in Pakistan that were interested in computers and wanted to make a career out of it, but didn't have access to the resources. I actually got one of them a computer with which he did diddly squat (stuck in a dead-end 90 dollar a month job), imo didn't have the right guidance to make something of it.

Again my point isn't that it won't be abused and wasted but that if even 1% of the people that get it make something out of themselves and manage to pull their families and their descendants out of poverty. I'd say its definitely worth it.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[Carnildo]

Or, can you tell me the relevance of having access to the complete works of Wikipedia versus getting Polio vaccinations, or vitamin supplements?

Would you rather have a foreigner come in and vaccinate you against the galloping shits, or would you rather read up on sanitation and learn that boiling your drinking water would prevent them in the first place? Would you rather head to the local charity for your monthly supply of vitamin pills, or would you rather learn about nutrition and decide to suppliment your rice crop with wheat?

For $75, we foreigners can come in and fix a few of the problems they're facing. Or, for $75, we can teach them how to fix many of the problems they're facing. Which is a better investment?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

Third Point: I think your missing the point. Having a computer won't do diddly squat, heck even I started off massively gaming. But being able to cut down the cost of acquiring books to near zero will help a lot. Being able to see animations of say bio stuff (how the heart pumps blood etc etc) will allow people to understand stuff better , pique and retain their interest. It's simply a tool to lower cost and increase the amount of information available. Whether it's used @ all or wasted is obviously up to the individual using it. I may have missed the point. But you argued that your marks in computer class dramatically increased. Thus there is an obvious implication in your statement that you believe that computers will be able to inherently increase GPA, for example.

Fourth Point: I haven't read much about it nor have you provided anything actually backing up what you said? Especially don't get how computers have anything to do with it except perhaps increasing the total pool of smart people out there. This was one of the most important points. I backed up what I said through the Wikipedia article (granted I could have done better... but it's a fairly common and well-known concept in Economics and Sociology.) ... In this case deduction itself should suffice, as I was merely trying to make you aware of the concept, and not search for and supply statistics and their various interpretations (That's what the reference section in Wikipedia is for).

Fifth Point: Again no one is saying they'll solve social issues You are wrong about this one. You yourself imply that it has helped you find employment (which is a social issue)... and has helped you in the class stratified society of Pakistan (another social issue). Yes a computer in this case has helped YOU deal with the symptoms of your society, but it has not solved the underlying problem.

And if you look at the very many rebuttals I have received, there are many people who believe that cheap computers will solve social issues like poverty. As someone rebutted:
"we've equipped them to drive themselves into the next generation of social and technical excellence."

Yes, one person even said that OLPC computers will solve health care issues. Another said they will solve third world hunger.

It's these type of fallacies that I am pointing out. For some reason, people, instead of acknowledging them, just seem to be getting defensive and using poor arguments to backup their belief system.

I think you make a better case than most, but still...
As my original post stated:

Don't get me wrong, I am certainly in favour of cheap computers, especially for poor people, but people should realize WHY they want this, and the reality of their ideals.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[pinkocommie]

I was specifically referring to computer science since it was directly applicable, as in I was able to engage with the subject matter. Which I thought I further clarified by stating that I'm now a Software Engineer b/c of it. In any case I agree that it 'inherently' can't increase GPA. It's simply a tool, its usage dictates what its effects are. Even so from my point of view I'd rather have more tools available for their improvement. This is particularly true where the kids don't have to be dependent on the status quo (bad education systems/teachers) to improve themselves.

I'm sorry I never took Sociology or Econ but with a passing knowledge in it, I did read the wikipedia article but the only thing I got from it was people graduating from college at a rate higher then high-skills job creation makes competition stiffer raising the minimum bar. Don't see how computers factor into that except increasing the competitors? As an American that may be bad but as a citizen of the world, may the best /smartest man/woman win.

I agree that it is incapable of solving the problems but IF it increases the amount of people that can solve the problem (educated free thinkers) it is at least a step in the right direction.

I think your looking at it as a cure-all, its just a nudge in the right direction, without a people rising up to control their destiny to fight those trying to squeeze them dry, to educate themselves and improve their lot no one can externally 'fix' their problems. This isn't misguided enough to think it can, they're simply attempting to improve the quality of education as an end to itself. Now if (admittedly a big if) they have some mild success with it, there can be secondary effects which have a high probability of being positive.

One more thing these are tools, no more no less and without them being used right won't achieve anything positive, can actually create a generation of scammers etc. I haven't read into the XO into much detail but I'd hope they're working to integrate the laptop's with educational followthrough - candidate material (I read about them wanting an SDK to let kids tinker etc but beyond that methods to leverage it to lower the cost of educational materials as much as possible n improve the quality of available material).

As an aside, evolution isn't mentioned much in the Pakistani curricula, I know a significant quantity of medical doctors that don't understand it much less agree with it. By having easily referenced external sources available the odd curious soul might go HMMMM...

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

I think your looking at it as a cure-all No it is certainly not ME who is thinking of OLPC as a cure-all :)

I'm sorry I never took Sociology or Econ but with a passing knowledge in it, I did read the wikipedia article but the only thing I got from it was people graduating from college at a rate higher then high-skills job creation makes competition stiffer raising the minimum bar. Don't see how computers factor into that except increasing the competitors? As an American that may be bad but as a citizen of the world, may the best /smartest man/woman win. I will spell it out:
a) You and others have said outright or implied that OLPC will help with employment
b) Inflation is the concept that where you have more of something, it becomes less valuable (i.e. having more overall money doesn't increase the amount of natural gas in the ground, so money becomes less valuable).
The same concept is applied with education. People are making all sorts of grandiose claims about OLPC, but are neglecting to realize the basic economic concepts of inflation. If people implementing a program without even attempting to learn about the consequences of what they are implementing (economic consequences or otherwise)... then this is just plain stupid.

It is like the people who introduce new species of animal into an ecosystem to solve a pest problem... thus creating a new problem. People who don't Plan are called Managers. They will always win arguments and make more money than me. But deep down inside they will realize that they care more about their ego than about their shallow belief system.

Remember:
I am not attacking OLPC. I am attacking poor arguments and faulty assumptions. I think OLPC is a good idea... just don't give me any grandiose belief systems along with it. (I'm not so much thinking of you pinkocommie, but some of the more radical and imaginative ideas that people make up in their imaginations and believe to be reality).

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[el americano]

You have to show your work anyway. My graphing calculator was for verification. With ten pages of equations, you can easily make a mistake somewhere. If you made it early, you won't even get partial credit. My HP48 served me well.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[mr_mischief]

The last time I checked, Nicholas Negroponte was not placing people on reservations or in gulags. He wants to give kids something that will help them enter an industrial economy or an information economy if they choose to use it. If they don't choose to use it and want to be subsistence farmers, then more power to them. The project isn't about force or coercion. It's about giving people a chance at something they had little chance at before, and they're free to turn that down.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

The last time I checked, Nicholas Negroponte was not placing people on reservations or in gulags. He wants to give kids something that will help them enter an industrial economy or an information economy if they choose to use it. If they don't choose to use it and want to be subsistence farmers, then more power to them. The project isn't about force or coercion. It's about giving people a chance at something they had little chance at before, and they're free to turn that down. I wasn't talking about Negroponte. I was talking about you and your racist language towards the people who don't meat up to your ideals of an industrialized lifestyle. This is what Rodyard Kipling called "The White Man's Burden"... It's the same racist tripe. In Canada we tried to assimilate them as well.

People never cease to amaze me. Instead of just admitting they are wrong, they make excuses for their belief systems. It almost seems as if everybody was born to be a politician.

Do the world a favour and stop condescending to people you don't know or understand.

These people don't NEED missionaries: whether they be religeous, economic OR political. When you say that Negroponte wants to help them be industrialized your ingnorance and cruelty is shining through. Do these people a favour and leave them alone.

I can assure you that turning the egalitarian subsistance farming community (you speak of) into a bunch of landless factory surfs is not going to make their lives better. You obviously haven't worked on an assembly line (I have). And I can assure you the industrialized life in the third world is quite a lot harsher than it is in the West. I am sure these people will hear about all the "advantages" of being exploited. You obviously haven't read the history of the VERY many ubiquitous efforts to "help" these un-industrialized people's "improve" themselves. Take your racism elsewhere... and tell your other Slashdot friends about what a crazy clued-out freak I am.

This so-called choice you speak of is illusionary... When they are being constantly pressured by religeous and economic evangelists like yourself that they are living in ignorance (without libraries and OLAP computers)... and that their lives would be better if they listened to the White Western Corp (OLAP, or what-have-you)... this is old news... VERY old news.

The more replies I get back about the OLAP program... the more negative it appears to be. I have went from neutral to negative on OLAP. I would like to thank the Slashdot community for educating me.

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[mr_mischief]

Yes, you are obviously very clued in. So much so that you know of a program called OLAP doing exactly what OLPC is trying to do.

"Do the world a favour and stop condescending to people you don't know or understand."

Follow your own fucking advice. Nobody in Cambodia asked you to protect them from food, water, medicine, and education. Nobody asked you to teach me what it's like to work in a factory, since I have. Nobody asked you to label people who are just trying to help, but your political feelings shine through when you do.

"People never cease to amaze me. Instead of just admitting they are wrong, they make excuses for their belief systems. It almost seems as if everybody was born to be a politician."

So, admit you're wrong already and stop making excuses for your isolationist, anti-modern, neoluddite, romantic agrarian belief system.

I'm about as racist as a peanut butter sandwich -- you, your black friends, your white friends, your red friends, and your yellow friends can just eat me. I don't give a fuck about your childish games. Did you know there are many poorly educated white people and many well educated people of other races? By saying that bringing education to the poor is racist, you're saying there's a specific race element to being poor. How's that make me the racist, you racist?

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[unlametheweak]

"Do the world a favour and stop condescending to people you don't know or understand."

Follow your own fucking advice. Nobody in Cambodia asked you to protect them from food, water, medicine, and education. Nobody asked you to teach me what it's like to work in a factory, since I have. Nobody asked you to label people who are just trying to help, but your political feelings shine through when you do.

- I am not protecting, nor trying to protect anybody
- I'm not trying to teach you what it is like to work in a factory
- I have labeled nobody

"People never cease to amaze me. Instead of just admitting they are wrong, they make excuses for their belief systems. It almost seems as if everybody was born to be a politician."

So, admit you're wrong already and stop making excuses for your isolationist, anti-modern, neoluddite, romantic agrarian belief system.

- As far as I am aware I am not wrong. I always correct myself when I make mistakes.
- I am not isolationist
- I am not anti-modern
- I am not neoluddite (in fact vary much the opposite)
- I don't know what a "romantic agrarian belief system" is, so I cannot comment.
- I don't make excuses

I don't give a fuck about your childish games.

- I don't play games

Did you know there are many poorly educated white people and many well educated people of other races? By saying that bringing education to the poor is racist, you're saying there's a specific race element to being poor. How's that make me the racist, you racist?

- I have NEVER said bringing education to poor people is racist.

My experiences derive from not only formally studying various socio-economic systems, but by actually having the opportunity to actually talk to a very wide variety of people from various places throughout the world.

You claim that you are not racist or condescending to these people and yet you make statements like:

- What phone are they going to use to reserve the book?
- With what light will they read it after the sun goes down?
- How are they going to travel 100 miles on foot to the "local library"?

- All of which are taking a very biased and Western industrialized perspective. And of course you are inserting your own biases by stating that people who don't have OLPC computers have libraries with only 5 books in them that are 100 miles away and that can only be reached on foot.
- In many places throughout the world, people go to sleep when the sun goes down. They do not find this to be an unfortunate outcome of their "poverty" because they never became industrialized

- Many of the people targeted with the XO are not living in clean rows of houses with white fences but with no computers.
- They're living in places where subsistence farming and odd jobs are the employment.
- They're happy to have clean water and vaccinations, some clothes and maybe some shoes.

- If you are telling me that these statements are not filled with prejudice then you are either lying or are not intellectually capable of acknowledging your own racism.
- You are making it VERY clear that you think subsistence farming is negative.
And if they don't have clean water, then chances are VERY high that this is because Western companies came in and started polluting their water supply. Laptop computers cannot make water clean.

- As for vaccinations; people generally have immunity from diseases that are not introduced by the likes of foreign invaders like economic and religious missionaries.

Of course schooling itself is a very Western and Industrialized notion. It does not make people smarter. It can however, in very rare circumstances, influence people

Re:If we're going to go that cheap...

[mr_mischief]

The target demographic was initially the poorest kids in the poorest countries. It has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with this being the only computer that serves the purpose of a reliable computer for education and skills training in certain areas.

I have a problem with people who are dismissive of reason no matter their skin color. How is that racist?

You called me racist because I said the XO laptop was largely targeted at people without amenities like indoor wiring and indoor plumbing. You called me racist because I said some of the villages targeted don't have regular schools and libraries. These are facts. There's no racial element to them.

Even if I think industrialism is better than subsistence farming, which I never said, that's not racist. Racism is the favoring of one group or another based on color, national origin, or some genetic marker. There is no racial element to type of employment chosen or type of employment by necessity when there is no choice. There's one type of work and another type of work. There's nothing that makes industrial work more fit for one skin color and farming more fit for another. To say that giving people a choice between one type of work and another is racist defies reason.

I For One...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Love the smell of Vapor in the morning.

That's "vapour", for my fellow POHMs.

Re:I For One...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean Vapir because she must be smoking something....

Re:I For One...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

That's "vapour", for my fellow POHMs.

POHM being a resistance of 10e15 ohms? The amount of voltage that will be required to power that computer, even at minute amperage, will certainly be too lethal to let children play with it.

Re:I For One...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

POHM

Fyunch-click

[Verteiron]

It's probably sad that when I saw "Crazy Eddie" my first thought was of Moties.

Re:Fyunch-click

[pilgrim23]

At least maybe it will brew a decent cup of Coffee? (for those who don't get the joke; read the book: http://www.amazon.com/Mote-Gods-Eye-Larry-Niven/dp/0671741926

Re:Fyunch-click

[Ironsides]

I just read that book last week and thought the same thing. I don't think you have a problem.

Re:Fyunch-click

[rickhale]

My first thought was of Moties, too.

Re:Fyunch-click

[Quadraginta]

Uh...there is another meaning than the Motie with the odd judgment? Amazing.

Re:Fyunch-click

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who grew up watching the superstations on television, "Crazy Eddie" has a different meaning. He was this guy who did cheap local commercials for his appliance/electronics superstores.

"Crazy Eddie - his prices are...INSANE!"

Re:Fyunch-click

[Beardo the Bearded]

"Your Majesty, I agree."

$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[mcmonkey]

We already have the $10 laptop

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[gall0ws]

I installed Debian on that. The last stable release.

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[CaptainPatent]

We already have the $10 laptop The best part: Yes, it runs Linux!

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[Bloater]

You lose your cool points. That was CGI. Show me a real one and you can have your points back.

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[noidentity]

I installed Debian on that. The last stable release.

Yeah, unless you shake it.

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[Riktov]

I installed the new Ubuntu release... I think it's called "Wobbly Worm".

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[earthforce_1]

I rememeber a Dilbert episode where the PHB was given your $10 laptop:
http://pics.livejournal.com/allah_sulu/pic/0002f3h8/g13

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[Richy_T]

http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/ee476/FinalProjects/s1999/felix/Final.htm

Rich

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[Richy_T]

Though that one is windows :(

Re:$200, $150, $75...where does it end?

[Bloater]

I think I've just cum.

...and

[thatskinnyguy]

...and it will end-up being $175 instead. We all saw how the $100 laptop dry run went.

Re:...and

[Anonymous Coward]

It's truly an amazing world we live in, where we complain about a portable 2,000 cm^3 device that contains hundreds of millions of precisely-arranged components, can perform millions of calculations per second, and store billions of bits of data... because it costs $188 instead of $100.

Such a device would have been pure fantasy even 10 years ago, at any cost, and yet now we scoff that they couldn't get the cost down low enough.

I'm not attacking your point (which is that promised prices may not be delivered)... rather just marveling at how advanced our tech has become.

Re:...and

[thatskinnyguy]

My IBM XT was waaaay bulkier, waaaay slower and still cost $8000.

Re:...and

[Anonymous Coward]

The $100 price will be reached. OLPC always said it depended on volume. Intel has been
trying to undercut OLPC in the market, and that I assume is why the price is what it is.
It is still the least expensive laptop in the world.

Re:...and

[imsabbel]

88% off are 88% off.
No matter if that base was 10c or $10 billion.

How to trust somebody doing calculations if he is nearly off by a factor of two?

Re:...and

[Anonymous Coward]

For a start, the USD has dropped a lot in value since the OLPC was announced with its intended price point, if you used a currency that held a steady value in this time period then the OLPC laptop would not be nearly as over budget as it currently appears to be, also they never intended to meet the $100 price point on the initial run, this price point was the intended goal after the project had been making laptops for a couple of years, so it was always going to be over the announced price initially, with economies of scale being used to bring the price down over time.

With this taken into account the OLPC may still be a little over the price they had planned to be at, but not a lot.

Does school OS have anything to do with home OS?

[quanticle]

When I was young, all the computers at school ran MacOS. My entire introduction to computing was done on Apple IIs and Macintoshes. However, when it came time to buy a computer for home, our family bought a Windows machine because it had better specs. Starting these kids out on Linux doesn't necessarily mean that they'll stay with Linux.

A major roadblock

[edwardpickman]

I don't see the LCD screens getting down to a price making this possible. The other option would be the laser projectors but it's new technology and it'll be years before they are cheap enough. With memory prices dropping I can see it with most of the components but I can't see anyway around the display problem.

Re:A major roadblock

[poot_rootbeer]

I don't see the LCD screens getting down to a price making this possible.

Hmm, I dunno, maybe Ms. Jepsen will create some innovative new display filter technology that allows 200dpi color-capable LCD screens with backlighting to be built for roughtly the same cost as a 75dpi monochrome LCD screen. Wouldn't that be something...

Re:A major roadblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Display costs will come down as the flaws in production systems are reduced. Remember the yields for the first alpha processors leaving mountains of scrap? The processors were launched when yields were less than 20% (sorry do not have the exact figures anymore).

When a certain number of pixels are non-functional, the display is scrapped. Going to a higher dots per inch specification means that a greater number of smaller dead pixels might still be acceptable for certain applications.

But what about the fish?

[zappepcs]

This is probably good news to Bruce Perens, who thinks that the recent report of Microsoft's dual-boot XO project (with Windows as well as the Linux-based Sugar OS) is a feint driven by Microsoft's fear of the entire third world learning Linux [CC] as children. I thought we were worried about them learning to fish?

Re:But what about the fish?

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting them on the internet means they can learn how to do anything, including how to fish.

Re:But what about the fish?

[ideapete]

The Microsoft cheap dual boot story smells no pun http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/01/10/microsoft-denies-dual-booting

Let's do the math

[roman_mir]

If the OLPC was supposed to be a $100 laptop but is sold for 200, then this new crazy laptop will cost 150. This is great news. Maybe they should develop a voting machine based on this technology, sell it to the government and give the laptops away for free to the OLPC.

Re:Let's do the math

[mrsbrisby]

If the OLPC was supposed to be a $100 laptop but is sold for 200, then this new crazy laptop will cost 150

Oh no, they're like tacheons. This guy will be like 500$ or something.

The OLPC is responsible for its own failing!

[arbirk]

I found this article - very interesting analysis: http://naturalbornpundits.blogspot.com/2008/01/rise-and-fall-of-olpc.html

Giver Her a Little More Credit

[eldavojohn]

Love the smell of Vapor in the morning. Ok, well, I guess to be fair, we should give her a little more credit than that. Mary Lou Jepson does have a PhD in opitcs and a BS in EE. She seems to be quite competent and is credited with some key design and inventions for the OLPC and also working politics with companies to design these displays specifically for the laptop, defined by the laptop. Not an easy thing to do.

So I'm guessing she was upset from the cost and believes that she can cut cost by doing again what she did for the OLPC, designing a better, cheaper display. This time, she can probably negotiate better deals as I'm sure the # of XOs in development causes display manufacturers to salivate.

So, before you accuse this of being vaporware, I would caution you that she has held up her end once for the OLPC ... and she seems to be highly motivated. She's got street cred.

Now, what makes me salivate is the site's promise to keep everything open. The software's a given at this point but open hardware would be revolutionary and present yet another learning possibility for users.

Re:Giver Her a Little More Credit

[xtracto]

Agree, Mary Lou is one of the persons who I believe deserve a slashdot interview. She and that cryptologist lady.

Re:Giver Her a Little More Credit

[Anonymous Coward]

Hedy Lamarr?

Re:Giver Her a Little More Credit

[markov_chain]

King Harald, is that you?

Re:Giver Her a Little More Credit

[Anonymous Coward]

>Hedy Lamarr?
She's dead, Jim.

The rich get richer, etc.

[mcmonkey]

This first occurred to me when the story first broke regarding the CTO of OLPC leaving to form her own company...

Doesn't any specific knowledge she has regarding the engineering of an inexpensive laptop targeted towards students in emerging economies belong to OLPC?

There have been many discussions on /. regarding non-compete agreements, IP, works-for-hire, etc. At the very least anything we wage slaves do for the company belongs to the company. At the most, companies try to claim ownership of stuff we do on our own time with our own resources, in addition to stuff we may have done before coming to the company or may do after leaving.

It would seem to me Mary Lou is free to take to her new company any general experience and knowledge she has, but in this case the new company is entirely based on IP that belongs to OLPC.

Or is this another standard that only applies to us wage slaves? What would happen to any of us if we so boldly left our employers to start a new company in direct competition?

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[MBGMorden]

OLPC is non-profit. You can't really leave and get into "competition" with an charitable organization.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[Diss Champ]

As far as I can see, her company is NOT in direct competition- the OLPC folks seem to be treating selling to the developed world to be something to be avoided; even this buy two get one program was set to end at the end of last year so they could focus their efforts on the undeveloped places. She however wants to sell to people with money. I'd think the two companies would get along rather well with each other, and be relatively happy information, and even where possible coordinate on components to drive down costs, to the benefit of both.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[KillerCow]

Were the OLPC peeps paid? If not, then I can't imagine any of them even reading a NCA without riotously laughing first.

Wasn't it an offshoot of academia, or at least headed by an academic? If so, then they aren't the type to use NCAs.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[Nursie]

A friend of mine did that.

Well, he and a bunch of others were made redundant by the company (company A) they worked for. So they decided to do it themselves (at company B) and do it better. He's worth a few million now IIRC.

What happened was they bought in a solution from another competitor (company C) and acted as a reseller to get the company off the ground whilst they wrote their own software. Company A then accused them of theft of code and used the fact that Company B were selling software so soon after startup as "proof". FACT/FAST and the police presumed guilt and immediately impounded all their equipment. My friend spent some time in a cells at a police station. There were various court appearances.

After about a year it was all cleared up, but they went through hell first.
And this didn't even involve and patent disputes.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[shadylookin]

Since the XO was based upon Open source software they can't make her sign any agreements not to use the software. About the only thing they could stop her from doing would be using their hardware, and since she intents to make laptops even cheaper she probably won't be using any of that knowledge. Well that's my non-legal background guess anyway.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[glop]

You might want to read the Groklaw interview. It is said there that her new company is licensing the tech she developed for OLPC from OLPC.

As you see, your post is plain wrong and very unfair to Ms. Jepsen. Too bad it was modded +3...

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[mcmonkey]

OLPC is non-profit. You can't really leave and get into "competition" with an charitable organization.

It's up to the OLPC folks if they wish to make an issue of it, but yes, you can get into "competition" with a charitable organization. 1) You can compete for donors, if donations are part of your 'business' model. (Not in the for-profit sense of a model of how to turn some resource into profit, but the model of how you're going to get done what it is you are trying to get done.)

2) You can compete for IP. If OLPC has patents on any novel hardware developments, perhaps part of the plan is to license those patents to futher the charitable goals.

3) Didn't we just have a story about Intel being in competition with OLPC for contracts? Granted, that case is for-profit Intel vs non-profit OLPC, where as I gather this new company is also non-profit.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[mcmonkey]

You might want to read the Groklaw interview. It is said there that her new company is licensing the tech she developed for OLPC from OLPC.

/. poster RTFA? Unpossible!

But it does fall in line with my past modding experience. When I try for informative/insightful I usually get modded 'funny'. When I try for funny I get 'troll' or 'flamebait'.

And apparently when I talk out of my arse without the facts, I get 'interesting'. Go figure.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[xtracto]

But you fail to see that whatever computer she creates may not compete with the OLPC at all. The OLPC is aimed at underdeveloped countries and is a non for profit effort, whereas this new computer could be aimed at the general American market (open market). They are completely two different kinds of markets, and it can even be argued that one of them is not a market.

Re:The rich get richer, etc.

[unlametheweak]

But it does fall in line with my past modding experience. When I try for informative/insightful I usually get modded 'funny'. When I try for funny I get 'troll' or 'flamebait'.

And apparently when I talk out of my arse without the facts, I get 'interesting'. Go figure.

When you post, tell us specifically if it is a 'funny' post or an 'arse' post etc... so we can moderate appropriately.

BTW, all my posts are Insightful unless otherwise stipulated.

Thanks for your cooperation,
UTW

the question is...

[Bored MPA]

Is this legit, or is their company funded by folks trying to undercut OLPC? Either way, vaporware is a very good strategy to get folks not to buy OLPC and to slow down the development (heh) of that market.

I haven't had my coffee, but this sort of announcement is also great cover for players (intel?, ms?) who want more time to boost alternatives to OLPC with more vendor/tech lock-in. Buyers/countries will consider waiting even longer to make a decision (the buyers aren't in a rush) based on lower price and new tech expectations.

AWESOME IDEA

[Deanalator]

You walk in to a computer store, and you see the 100 dollar laptop and right next to it you see the 75 dollar laptop -- which one you gonna spring for?

Re:AWESOME IDEA

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with a $50 laptop. Then you're in trouble, huh?

Exclusive NEWS

[zukinux]

(2 weeks from now) : Formet OLPC CTO Aims to Create a $74 Laptop.!!!

People learning linux

[blind biker]

I think MS should rather fear something else being learned by the new generations.

Re:People learning linux

[snl2587]

Given that all of those laptops can run Windows, and also many of them probably have the Mac version of Office installed (ever bought a fresh copy of Windows/Office not attached to hardware? Costs a bit much, and gives Microsoft quite a bit more money on a per-computer basis than the bulk licenses), I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about. It does bother me a little that some schools mandate computer types, and that's coming from someone who uses Windows reluctantly for school/work and boots into Linux for everything else.

Re:People learning linux

[Xinef Jyinaer]

I'd like to mention that while that may seem bad - My cousin who goes to Fanshawe college in London Ontario was forced to buy a mac laptop (for her photography program course). Personally I find it ridiculous. (I admit my bias I plainly hate everything apple, and won't touch something if it has an apple logo on it - Though I don't consider myself a linux or windows fanboi I genuinely prefer either of them over anything apple. Though my preference still lands in linux land)

Crazy Eddie?

[truthsearch]

Time to go Crazy Eddie? They do know that Crazy Eddie was forced to sell out of his own company, fled to Israel, and later went to jail for fraud, right? There's good reason companies don't usually mention his name these days.

Although as a kid I used to go to his store to get cheap video games...

Try this.. it's close

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Although not a laptop I can show you a 5 cent word processor

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[Fred_A]

When I was young, all the computers at school ran MacOS. My entire introduction to computing was done on Apple IIs and Macintoshes. However, when it came time to buy a computer for home, our family bought a Windows machine because it had better specs. Starting these kids out on Linux doesn't necessarily mean that they'll stay with Linux.

Why not, Linux is widely recognised as having better specs.

Better specs don't sell though. Marketing and subsequent mindshare do (case in point : Windows - various incarnations).

Re:Fyunch-click - You fixed *what*?

[mykepredko]

When I saw the quote, I thought about the scene in the book where the Moti Engineer took apart and put together Lady Sally's palmtop computer which was thought to be impossible because everything was one single unit.

To hit $75 for a laptop, the same technology will be required.

myke

That's answered in the Groklaw interview

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: I understood that you have one or more patents in screen technology which are in the XO laptop. Are you taking those patents with you for licensing, or do they belong to OLPC? Can you clarify the patent situation for us?

Mary Lou Jepsen: When we eventually filed papers to make the OLPC 501c6 real, we also then started hiring (in early 2006). I then assigned the inventions that I had both already made and would make to OLPC. Pixel Qi -- my new company -- is now licensing my inventions from OLPC. This isn't an OLPC employee benefit, it's a deal I created with OLPC and Pixel Qi, and the benefit will go to OLPC and to the children of the world, lowering the price of the laptops, and thus allowing more kids to get laptops.

if the OLPC were subject to market forces ....

[peter303]

A possible failing is that Negroponte was operating outside of the market. Who knows his costs? He is soliciting governments directly, not competative bidding.

His intentions are noble, but the execution is questionable.

Microsoft won't be allowing dual boot

[TropicalCoder]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1096

Re:Microsoft won't be allowing dual boot

[Bralkein]

From the article you linked to:

While we have investigated the possibility in the past, Microsoft is not developing dual-boot Windows XP support for One Laptop Per Childs XO laptop. As we announced in December, Microsoft plans to publish formal design guidelines early this year that will assist flash-based device manufacturers in designing machines that enable a high-quality Windows experience. Our current goal remains to provide a high-quality Windows experience on the XO device. In addition, there will be limited field trials in January 2008 of Windows XP for One Laptop per Childs XO laptop. Microsoft recommends contacting the company directly for any further updates.

Yikes! To me, this reads like Microsoft aren't planning to introduce Windows as a dual-boot option, rather they intend to replace Linux entirely on the XO machines. How are they going to do this without increasing the cost of the laptop? I suppose they would have to give the OS away for free, but what are the legal implications here? I recall hearing that it can be illegal to drop your price to zero in order to flush out a competitor. If this is the case, then I wonder if this isn't a rather risky move for MS, especially considering their history of lawsuits for anti-competitive practices.

Re:Microsoft won't be allowing dual boot

[Pecisk]

Wow, ZDNET feels like total Microsoft shill here. But I guess all this is just a empty noice - if XP could run on XO, then it would already did. Classmate PC and other "alternatives" for XO indicates that Microsoft has nothing to set against XO.

Re:Microsoft won't be allowing dual boot

[robot_love]

If this is the case, then I wonder if this isn't a rather risky move for MS, especially considering their history of lawsuits for anti-competitive practices.

I would think it isn't risky at all, considering the effect those lawsuits have had on Microsoft's monopoly. :(

Completely Offtopic

[prichardson]

The last sentence of the story renders in an odd way for me.

This is probably good news to Bruce Perens, who thinks that the recent report of Microsoft's dual-boot XO project (with Windows as well as the Linux-based Sugar OS) is a feint driven by Microsoft's fear of "the entire third world learning Linux as children."

for me, 'fear of "the entire third world learning Linux' is underlined as a link, but '"the entire third world learning Linux as children."' is green like a link. Does this have something to do with closing the link in the middle of a quote? Is this a slashdot problem or a problem with my rendering engine?

I'm using Safari Version 3.0.4 (5523.10.6)

Re:Completely Offtopic

[muellerr1]

A little of both. It's a malformed link coupled with the Safari Webkit application framework.

Re:Completely Offtopic

[Larry_The_Canary]

I think it's a slashdot problem. From the page source:

<a href="http://technocrat.net/d/2008/1/10/33518">fear of "the entire third world learning Linux</a> <a> as children."</a>

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[spun]

Ahhh, if these kids parents could afford laptops with better specs, I doubt they'd be getting OLPCs in the first place.

Stop thinking of it that way.

[xzvf]

As an educational tool, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Look at the laptop type devices being put out by Leapfrog, V-tech and Fisher Price. All in the $50 range. Adding a larger screen and internet access, might be possible for $75. It depends on what you want it to do and the profit margin expected. My Atari 2600 put some darn good games in 4K. The XO laptop is close to duplicating a full featured laptop for only $200. It is a resounding success. If for profit companies can build on that with a number of educational appliances that cost $75 and down, even better. If OLPC and the XO have a problem it isn't the hardware, it's software designed to allow kids to learn themselves and an inability to market that idea. Like schools in the US, the administration wants control, and they often resent kids learning on their own.

Re:Stop thinking of it that way.

[Kadin2048]

I think this is a good point. A $75 'educational device' might not really be a general-purpose computer in the way we're familiar with it, and that might be perfectly okay. There seems to be a big assumption that general-purpose PCs are the way to go in the classroom, and to be honest I don't see a lot of evidence of this. It seems like a bit of a leap of faith, really.

Obviously, a general-purpose computer is better than nothing, so I'm not denigrating the OLPC, but that's not to say that the modern PC is the be-all and end-all of educational hardware. I think it's entirely possible that more "limited" devices are actually superior.

I, and many other Slashdotters I'm sure, cut my teeth on the Apple II series in school; I always thought these were a good design and I've heard quite a few teachers speak nostalgically of them. You put in a disk for the program you wanted to run, you turned it on. When you were done, you saved and turned it off. If a kid messed it up, all you had to remember was the "three finger salute" of Ctrl-Apple-Rst. The only things you really needed to beat into kids' heads was not to try and pull a disk out of the drive when the access light was on. I've always wondered if something similar might not be good for modern classrooms -- put each program on a bootable CD, and don't install a hard drive in the machine. Boot the computer from the disc you want, saving all your data to a USB key; when you're done, turn it off.

The PC basically killed off all the alternative paradigms because it's "good enough" for almost everything, and economies of scale made it cheap. But now I think we're getting to the point where we can use the manufacturing expertise gained through PC development to produce alternative devices once more, and get back some of the diversity in hardware that's been lost.

Re:Stop thinking of it that way.

[aproposofwhat]

I, and many other Slashdotters I'm sure, cut my teeth on the Apple II series in school

PDP-11 in my case :P

Get off my lawn.

Re:Stop thinking of it that way.

[BBandCMKRNL]

ASR-33 Teletype connected to GE timesharing system over 110 baud acoustic coupler.

Yes, GE did actually make computers at one time. I think the OS was called something like GECOS - GE Commercial Operating System.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[Hatta]

Using more than one OS ensures that they'll learn general skills instead of just learning how to use app ABC on OS XYZ.

No, $141!

[StefanJ]

The announced final price for the XO Laptop is $188.

If the same inflation figure is used, the $75 will rise to $141.

Which is still pretty amazing.

Re:No, $141!

[Carnildo]

And if you measure in Euros, it'll be 60 of 'em before and after.

Re:No, $141!

[Propaganda13]

The announced final price for the XO Laptop is $188.

If the same inflation figure is used, the $75 will rise to $141.

I was thinking the same thing.

One option is to take the XO Laptop and see what could be sacrificed to reduce cost. Drop the camera, the microphone, 1 speaker. Simplify the case design to reduce cost (no pivot, integrate antenna, less curves, drop the two-tone color scheme). Little things to drop $47. I do wonder how much company sponsorship in a much-hyped project reduced the cost of the OLPC though or if it increased it due to company pressure for certain design changes.

How about a DS?

[sootman]

I think this guy has a lot of good points. (Just skip halfway down past the ranty bits. :-) )

The Nintendo DS...

• It's cheap. ($129... and I'm sure if you order 150 million Nintendo will cut you a deal.)
• It's power-efficient. (Easily lasts 14 hours on a single charge, even with the screen bright enough to be seen in direct sunlight.. there's even a hand-crank charger!)
• It's a computer. (All advantages to be gained by giving a young child a laptop are also gained by giving a child a DS. Just by using a DS they'll become confident and "fluent" in the use of technology, and future "real" computer use will come much much easier. Worked for me!)
• It's got wi-fi. (In fact, it even does ad-hoc networking, and allows downloading content from one host DS to all the others.. just the teacher could have the lesson plan on their DS and wirelessly beam it to all the students at the start of each class!)
• It's rugged. (Nintendo's been making toys for actual children for over 100 years and Game Boys have survived actual wars.)
• It's powerful enough. (If it can handle Mario Kart tournaments, it can handle Multipli Kation tables.)
• It's small and has a touch screen. (Like the iPhone. Just like laptops have replaced the desktop, in the future ever smaller portable electronics will replace the laptop. Why teach on antiquated technology?)
• It's forward-compatible. (Nintendo's portable systems have very long life cycles. Any software you write for the DS will very likely still be runable on the hardware they're selling in a decade.)
• Children love it. (You want a teaching tool that's "fun to use?" You want a teaching tool that's "collaborative" You've hit "the jackpot.")
• It's a world-wide standard. (Over 53 MILLION have been sold already. The platform has thousands of developers. The future leaders of the developed world are growing up playing Nintendo DS.. why give the future leaders of the developing world anything less?)
• It's already used for education. (Millions use their DS to learn a language, develop logic skills, practice cooking, learn math, read books, research, and browse the web every day!)

Re:How about a DS?

[blind biker]

Nice idea. For me, the disadvantage compared to the OLPC is that you can't run (or at least I don't know of one) a development environment on the DS itself. And even if you could, it's usage would be challenging.

Re:How about a DS?

[RobBebop]

The DS relies on Proprietary Software. Proprietary Software vendors usually like to charge money for their Software. Thus, the $129 cost you quoted is ONLY IF YOU WANT A FUNCTION-LESS BRICK.

One reason why OLPC is so cheap is because the OS was developed by Red Hat from a Linux based system. The education programs that come with it are also Open. And the children can develop their own programs to further improve the OLPC.

Education with a DS would become too much of a business to serve the children any good. And last time I checked, it is better to separate business interests from educational interests.

Re:How about a DS?

[gad_zuki!]

It doesnt have a keyboard and the screen is way, way too small to be used for anything serious like schoolwork. Just because theyre third-world doesnt mean they deserve junk like this. Their ergonomics should be important to us. Its a real shame it isnt.

Re:How about a DS?

[Kuukai]

Well, this has many of the same problems the Classmate does, according to TFA. It isn't waterproof, it's not very durable despite your assertions (if you don't know someone with a broken one, you need to get out more), and the battery life/expense/environmental-effect isn't very good. Like the sibling posts mentioned, it also requires licenses to develop for, and it has no keyboard, making input tedious. In addition, there are some general factual errors with your post. Hanafuda isn't "for children," so I wouldn't say Nintendo has been in the toy business for a 100 years. Also I don't know of any software to "learn cooking" on the DS any better than you can "learn guitar" on the PS2... Cooking Mama gives you a "general idea," but you're not going to succeed without a real recipe. The kind you can look up on Google. With an XO.

Re:How about a DS?

[Anonymous Coward]

One problem with the price for a DS is that it's likely Nintendo takes a loss on them (or, at least, does not make enough profit to even cover engineering resources). Like other similar products, the profit is not in the enabler, it's in the games.

Re:How about a DS?

[BarlowBrad]

Also I don't know of any software to "learn cooking" on the DS any better than you can "learn guitar" on the PS2.

Um... Guitar Hero?

Re:How about a DS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Guitar Hero will help you a great deal in learning to play a guitar with five frets and one string. You could play all the classics, like 'Mary had a little lamb' and 'Hot-cross buns', but seriously, Guitar Hero Skillz != Real Guitar Skills.

Re:How about a DS?

[xenocide2]

One of the common complaints I hear about the OLPC from missionaries claiming to be more in touch with African life than engineers is that the cell phone has already come in strong. Cell phone technology allows farmers to time the market when selling their crops, for example. Of course, you have to have something worth investing in a cell phone before it's something you can expect to see pervasive.

The DS does have several shortfalls, even if you're willing to assume that third world computing may appear in vastly different forms than we are familiar with:

* The screen is only barely readable in sunlight, and the battery lasts for shorter time frames. The OLPC project actually solved this.
* It has wifi, but a very weak one that needs a VERY solid infrastructure surrounding it to pull off. The OLPC's network is ad-hoc, meaning the device itself can form the infrastructure in places without any.
* It needs more RAM. Something you can probably address in a customized device, but it'll raise the price.
* To go along with that, it has no MMU. Meaning that any one crash can take out the whole thing. It's likely also missing operating system support opcodes to secure the thing. In essence, you will be running as root, at all times and everywhere.
* It lacks any standard adapters, like USB or even a damn microphone jack.
* Having only 1 touch screen severely cripples usability in normal apps, so you have to put a lot of legwork there, both in thinking about the interface and in writing new and existing apps to use it.

But there are a few benefits:
* Despite critics saying the screen is too small for things like WWW browsing to amazon.com or Wikipedia (they're right), most internet resources require proficiency in English, or a translation. If you go to the trouble to make a mobile viewable website you might as well translate it into a few local languages while you're at it. It may well be that the Web concept is abandoned in favor of publishing data via xml, or maybe web services style. But the DS and other mobile devices can rarely handle the drop in efficiency Javascript implies.
* Handwriting is probably better in regions with several spoken and written languages than printed keyboards. Certainly better in places without small alphabets.

Re:How about a DS?

[dintech]

Alright Class, let's try one of these comparisons again, some of us are a little slow today.

Also I don't know of any software to "learn boxing" on the xbox 360 (fight night round 3) any better than you can "learn guitar" on the PS2.

You see how that workd yet?

regular laptops plunging too

[peter303]

I saw an ad in the paper this morning; 3GB core, 300GB disk, wifi, DVD burner, webcam $999.

2GB/160GB $549

Unable to imagine does not create anything

[symbolset]

OLPC is good enough to access content like MIT Open Courseware. Expanding access to content like that from what was previously available to these kids is just amazing.

There are a lot of brilliant people in the world who, for lack of access to good education cannot realise their potential. I would prefer that your lack of imagination not prevent them. We are going to need them.

I would also prefer that the next billion people to come online in the digital age not be burning 300 watts each to support Microsoft bloatware. That's a lot of carbon for no real benefit.

Too Good an Opportunity

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So here's what I think actually happened. Jepson (Ms. or Mrs anyone know?) got tired of turning down backroom deals from Microsoft and realized there was insane amounts of money to be made by creating a low end device and letting MS pay you to not install Linux on it. She figured she could make herself untold riches and at the same time drain some cash away from MS, potentially weakening them and helping third world countries. I see the business model as follows:

1. Spec out a new low end device including Linux ala OLPC.
2. Build a prototype.
3. Make a deal with a third world country to tentatively pre-order it.
4. Use connections to OLPC project and capitalize on the press OLPC gets for good work to get this hyped in the news.
5. Wait for MS to try to pay you off to use Windows and/or pay off the third world country to require Windows.
6. Profit! ...err I mean ship the devices with Windows to be used as glorified calculators while splitting the profits between the new company and the third world country.
7. Wait for MS marketing to offer you money to tell everyone how great they are doing... then take it and profit some more.
8. Goto 1.

TV out?

[alohatiger]

Why not make a cheap computer that can be plugged into a TV? I'm sure there's a large population of children in the world who have TV but no computer.

Re:TV out?

[fireboy1919]

Yeah! Only why stop there? You could make it output HDMI and be able to do DRM so that third world children would even have access to DRM protected content.

For that matter, make it so that it's got 6 channel surround sound for the third world children! And beer! And hookers!

In fact, forget the third world children!

Seriously, though...it's got a hand crank. If it's really going to be sold in places without electricity, there's *no way* TV will work. CRTs take far, far too much power.

blah

[nawcom]

from what i remember, there were specs that microsoft wanted negroponte to change to make it compatible with windows xp. and he, in fact, pointed out that he wasn't going to change the flash drive capacity by adding an ssd slot to satisfy profit http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/06/2049201 -makers like microsoft weren't going to really help out the true purpose of the laptop.

suddenly this answer to solving lack of computers in poor countries is going to be compatible with commercial OSs? does it really matter? I'm not a big linux fanboy, hell, if i took the fanboy label, i would prefer the bsd fanboy. with that said, I thought the purpose of this laptop is to be an inexpensive communication device - does it matter what OS it runs on? from what i understand, Mozilla contributed to this project - for free - a browser that can be compiled for most OSs. now microsoft is going to be operating system number 2 on this laptop - charging a small price.

ok , so im ranting now - but i guess my point is that negroponte has forgotten the purpose of this project, if he wants to sell a laptop that has 2 OSs competing against each other (by default?) I can see countries' reasons for war changing from religion to operating system preference. bleh.

let's look at the specs again

[SgtChaireBourne]

If the OLPC was supposed to be a $100 laptop but is sold for 200, then this new crazy laptop will cost 150. This is great news. Maybe they should develop a voting machine based on this technology, sell it to the government and give the laptops away for free to the OLPC.

Let's take that in context.

The enormity of the price overrun is attributable to M$ getting OLPC to increase the specs drastically until the hardware became at least theoretically possible to run M$ Cruftware. If M$ boosters cannot kill the OLPC, they have to at least slow it down by any means necessary. Failing to do so means that a market for notebooks opens up without their monopoly. Todate M$ business model has focussed largely on leveraging the desktop monopoly Bill's mom got for him from IBM. We have a few decades of experience to watching M$ products and services become less and less competitive. Preserving the monopoly is the only way to keep the cult going.

Further, if Linux takes over the new market, or even breaks into it, the old markets will want it, too. We're almost there, with manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo almost offering Linux pre-installed.

7-Minute Abs

[viner!]

Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted Stroehmann: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted Stroehmann: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted Stroehmann: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted Stroehmann: You guarantee it? That's -- how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted Stroehmann: That -- good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted Stroehmann: Why?
Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
http://imdb.com/title/tt0129387/

Of course

[Anonymous Coward]

... i would buy a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these! :D

Elonka Dunn?

[eldavojohn]

She and that cryptologist lady. Elonka Dunn? It never ceases to amaze me when someone says "Oh yeah, I like whats-her-face a lot." You could bother to find out what her name is or admit that you don't think enough of her to remember her name.

Re:Elonka Dunn?

[Symbolis]

Helps to get her name right, yourself.

It's Elonka DunIn. :)

Re:Elonka Dunn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Helps to get her name right, yourself.

It's Elonka DunIn. :) Uh, what the fuck? I'm not the one that said she deserved an interview. Fucking idiots all over today ...

World Class Machine

[hhawk]

This is huge news. I've always said we need a computer that many people in the world can afford. With 5-6 Billion People a 600 to 700 machine is so far beyond their reach. I'd really like to see a $25 machine but $75 great.

My theory, un-tested is that most family's can't afford to budget more than 1 weeks income every 3-4 years for a computer. Of course the wealthy can do whatever they wish. Personally I spend $800 on a monitor every 5-7 years and $400 to $500 on a new CPU/Box every 14 months.

With a price at $75 I would expect that means there is at leaset 1 BILLION people whose family can now afford such a device, and may be more than that. I'd like a machine that 4 Billion people could afford every 3-5 years. They we will have a real shot a planet wide culture. Today we have A few 100 million to a Billion people spending most of the $$, most of the energy, etc.

Putting a cheap computer in their home will not change economics but it can help teach them to read, and give them a path to education, which might take a few generations but will help all over time.

Personally low powered desktops would be better than laptops esp. a model that could use the TV screen to lower costs, for those homes that have TVs.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[xzvf]

When I was a kid my school has TRS-80 model III's and my family bought me an Atari 800. The Apple II was over $1000 then.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[gardyloo]

Yeah, some people have learned how to use one-button and two-button mice!

What they don't seem to realise is...

[asuffield]

Crazy Eddie is supposed to fail.

Get this: the $7 laptop!

[p3d0]

Kinda like Seven-Minute Abs.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[slashdotmsiriv]

First, these are laptops we are talking about. Students can take them home. As long as the more powerfull Windows machines
don't have anything more to offer than the OLPC, students would prefer to work on them. The truth is that powerful Vista machines have nothing more to offer with respect to web browsing and editor capabilities, children would stick with the same machine they use at school just because of the convenience of not having to copy their work from the OLPC to the windows machine and vice versa.

Second, a large portion of the market for OLPC consists of low income families. They don't have the means to buy extra home computing devices
with better specs.

The Price is Right

[openldev]

This is a like a sick PR version of the Price is Right ... I bid $1 Drew!

Marginal Cost

[colmore]

Sooner or later the global market is going to teach MS that the marginal cost of software is $0.00. At that point the platform that is better at doing things for free is pretty much sure to win out.

So yeah; bring it on.

Re:Marginal Cost

[SomeOtherGuy]

"At that point the platform that is better at doing things for free is pretty much sure to win out."

Or better yet the platform that is pretty good at doing things for cheap or free is good enough.

I love it that there is now becoming competition and market for something that does not have 2 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hard drive and a gigaflop super duper core processor and blue lightScribe DVD running through a battery in 45 minutes to power a $400 OS from Microsoft or Mac.

  Most people could (and want to) make do with 512 Megs of memory, 5 gigs of hard drive space, a couple of flash slots and whatever free operating system can fire a up a web browser and music player.....and let them wirelessly browse the web, watch youtube and listen to music for a few hours between re-charges.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[nickptar]

The truth is that powerful Vista machines have nothing more to offer with respect to web browsing and editor capabilities,

Yes. Yes, they do.

Have you used an OLPC? I got one recently (through the Give 1 Get 1 program), and the software is crap. The browser doesn't have tabs, or even history besides Forward/Back, and it can't play YouTube videos (I don't know if this is just a software limitation or if the hardware is too weak). You can bet Firefox or IE on a full-size PC has "more to offer". The word processor isn't so bad, but (AFAIK) it can't open or save to a location in the file system - storage is accessed through a poorly-implemented "Journal" interface. (I know the intent is to be less confusing to new users, but a) it's still plenty confusing and underpowered and b) it's poorly integrated - f.ex., trying to upload a file to a web page opens a standard file selector dialog.) Applications are slow to start, and you can't view more than one window at once (or open new browser windows - you have to, slowly, start another browser process). Etc.

Don't get me wrong - I like the OLPC concept, and the hardware, and the idea of an OS more suited to children's use, and I'm sure future revisions of the software will fix some of these problems, but I'm in awe that these machines are actually being given to children in their current sorry state. The starry-eyed open-source idealism, overly-ambitious wheel-reinventing, and general amateurishness of their software development effort are pretty disappointing.

Who said $75 is the selling price?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

That might be the build price. By the time you add in margins and other costs it could be way higher.

Who is Bruce Perens?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Bruce Perens and why do we give a crap about what he thinks?

HEDLEY.

[Anonymous Coward]

(sorry)

Microsoft... fears? Bwahaha!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably good news to Bruce Perens, who thinks that the recent report of Microsoft's dual-boot XO project (with Windows as well as the Linux-based Sugar OS) is a feint driven by Microsoft's fear of "the entire third world learning Linux as children."

Microsoft fears? Then why are all the PURCHASERS of the XO machines insisting they run Windows? Maybe they view Teh Lunix as an attempt to shut their people out of the global job market? Which it is, whether it's intended or not. Some kid in a poor nation shouldn't be used as a pawn in the FOSSie's war against all things Microsoft, and it's really pathetic that such is the way FOSSies think. There is no action, no matter how evil or immoral, which a FOSSie will not justify in their war against Microsoft.

But as always, the failure of Teh Lunix is due to the customers. People want Windows. Nobody wants Lunix. If someone is REALLY looking for a Windows alternative... they'll just go buy a Mac.

But somehow, the fact that Lunix's market share is below 1% is Microsoft's fault. But it's even been proven that if a person needs to choose between using Teh Lunix or stealing Windows... they will choose Windows any time.

So yeah... I'm going to go out on a limb and say Microsoft has nothing to fear.

"First they ignore Teh Lunix, then they laugh at Teh Lunix, then they go back to ignoring Teh Lunix, then they win."
-Ghandi

I want to develop for Atari Joystick

[curri]

Last year? I saw this new implementations of Atari games in a device that looks like their original joystick, that you plug to the TV. They sold for around $25, and you can find them for about $15 now; the later ones have new games, with other characters (Dora, Spider man etc) and actually sell you a 'software key', so they have another way to make money; Having something like that but open (as in, I can program it myself) would be great.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[0100010001010011]

The point of linux isn't to secure 1000s of Linux users in the future.

The reason for linux is it's free. If I have to make something for as cheap as possible am I going to be able to get there paying a license to some company for their OS?

So by the time we can buy one...

[gleffler]

It'll cost $150 and you'll have to buy two of them at once and only get one, right? And you'll only be able to buy it for a week. No, two. No, a month. No, 6 weeks. No, however long we say.

That seems like how the last "$100 laptop" program worked out for OLPC.

I don't get why Slashdot gives so much press to these people when they admit they can't maintain their own goals, the program is mired in political bullshit, and the very idea of giving kids a laptop and acting as if it will cure all their ills is idealistic at absolute best. OLPC is bust, Netcraft confirms.

Re:So by the time we can buy one...

[Doug Merritt]

Reading your (few and ancient) journal entries, apparently you have wondered in the past why you have been called a Troll.

I don't get why Slashdot gives so much press to these people when they admit they can't maintain their own goals,

"Citation needed", except you're probably merely talking about the OLPC target price of $100 versus the recent actual price of $188. Well, duh, "target price" is a hope for the future. Initial price being higher is not "admitting they can't maintain their own goals". Sheesh.

the program is mired in political bullshit,

"Citation needed", very definitely. "Mired" is unsupportable, and "political bullshit" is created by their enemies (clearly including Intel at this point), but you phrase it as if OLPC themselves did something wrong. I call bullshit.

and the very idea of giving kids a laptop and acting as if it will cure all their ills is idealistic at absolute best.

"Citation needed" once again. You make me tired. Talk about hyperbole. No OLPC person has ever said that the OLPC goals will "cure all their ills". That's bigtime bullshit, and you should be ashamed for the misrepresentation, you really should.

OLPC is bust,

"Citation needed" yet again! They are shipping. They're an ongoing concern. There is no strong evidence that they have actually "failed" (either short term or long term) in any sense at all.

Netcraft confirms.

I searched Netcraft and saw nothing about OLPC, but maybe I just wasn't thorough enough. Still, this smacks of merely more of your trolling.

Before posting, I checked your slashdot journal and your website. Your research seems interesting, you seem superficially as if you might be an interesting person, but apparently once in a while you just get irrationally angry on some topic and, given what you yourself have said on the topics in question, do not understand that that's what you have done. Introspect more, then you will see why (once a year or so, since you post infrequently) people say you are a big time Troll.

You're being so much of a troll here that it makes me wonder what you did 5 years ago to get +1 Karma. Maybe you should wonder, too, and then try to repeat your positive side, rather than your negative side!

Re: Families & Computers

[TaoPhoenix]

Family finances are really more flexible than that.

The "Poor" get EIC credits, which they turn around to spend on things. Not all of them spend every last cent on the cheapest Price-per-pound bread, rice, & celery.

The "Middle Class" can often "afford" to budget more than "one week's pay per 3/4 years". This group is susceptible to the "Coffee Fallacy". If you get them in an emotional mood, they'll say "I can't afford to spend Five hundred dollars on a computer...". Then they go buy a coffee and go back to work.

I would rephrase this as "I don't like the value received if I spend my money on a computer. I prefer weekly amenities instead".

Re: Families & Computers

[hhawk]

I think EIC is US thing? I'm not really sure. I'm fairly sure that the bulk of the world's poor, up to 5 Billion of them in places like China, India, Africa, etc. don't get EIC.

Well I've already got one

[ColdWetDog]

And it's not exactly a burner with the Sugar interface. So if

The enormity of the price overrun is attributable to M$ getting OLPC to increase the specs drastically until the hardware became at least theoretically possible to run M$ Cruftware

Then it was a fortuitous move since having it even more underpowered would make it a most unpleasant user experience. Never attribute to malice what can explained by incompetence (or merely wishful thinking).

Oh, not schools again

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, well, I guess to be fair, we should give her a little more credit than that. Mary Lou Jepson does have a PhD in opitcs and a BS in EE.

I've known plenty of ivy league PhDs who are just plain stupid. When I was young, some older PhD told me that "a PhD is not a degree of intelligence"; I didn't believe him, until about 10 years later. It's true.

I would caution you that she has held up her end once for the OLPC ... and she seems to be highly motivated. She's got street cred.

OK, then maybe it's going to be fine.

Imagine if she had a PhD, but never produced anything. Now imagine if she single-handedly built the OLPC, but never went to school. See what I'm getting at? Degrees mean squat.

Sounds right to me.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Crazy Eddie is supposed to fail.

But in a way that drags others along - for instance, after a period of apparent success.

And that's exactly what happened with this one.

Given the location and timing, I wonder if this "Crazy Eddie" actually was the inspiration for the one in the Motie story.

Is Jerry P. active on slashdot these days? Maybe he can tell us. (Ditto Larry N. But I know Jerry P. is active in hacker circles.)

= = = =

Reminds me of "Crazy Jim's" hamburger stand in Ann Arbor back in the '60s. Greasy but cheap.

Re:Sounds right to me.

[asuffield]

But in a way that drags others along - for instance, after a period of apparent success.

And always with the very best of intentions.

Re:Does school OS have anything to do with home OS

[ZombieRoboNinja]

But the OLPC doesn't come with "more than one OS."

Moore's Law puts that right on the price curve ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... presuming you apply it to cutting price rather than increasing performance.

Re:Fyunch-click - You fixed *what*?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol I was really just struck by what a PERFECT analogy her dreams of computers for children are for the Crazy Eddie quote...

And then I remembered

"Crazy Eddie is SUPPOSED to fail"

And that made me sad...

Stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

For an etch-a-sketch, it's only stable until someone flips it over and shakes it.

But getting back to the fish...

[vorlich]

Hans Rosling has shown that the fundamental variable in the development of society is the improvement of health care. Once the health of a country is improved it moves inexorably towards a better standard of life.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92%3E%3E%3E%3E%3E%3E%3E+.r1885 - it's a 21 minute video that also proves monkeys are smarter than Professors.

Karl Marx, held the opinion that improvements in society were a result of the invention of the railways which provided low cost travel for activists to travel around encouraging the creation of trade unions and cooperatives. Andrew Carnegie's donation of libraries to Scotland and his other philanthropic activities are often presented as evidence of the effects of a fair distribution of knowledge. Neither of these innovations provided the level of observable improvement in living conditions for the average Scottish citizen. Improvements to living standards only began to appear post 1947 when universal free health care became a canon of British society. Children were vaccinated, millk and vitamins were provided free, schools dinners were subsidised or free and health checks were a normal event at primary school. So while I welcome the development of low-priced gadgets and anything else that might have a useful application anywhere in the world and have no doubt that it will be important, I would encourage everyone not to assume what impact sexy products such as these will have.

speed

[SgtChaireBourne]

Well I can't imagine it would be screaming fast, though there is little technical information on the Sugar GUI. It would really be good to see even a simple comparison vs fluxbox or something similar. Fluxbox ran nicely on a 333 MHz PII w/128MB of RAM that I used to have. However, we had in the early 80's reasonably fast, if simple, GUIs that ran in <32 KB of RAM on 8-bit 1 MHz CPUs, so even smaller is possible.

The lightweight fvwm and other window managers are definitely simple enough, the question remains can the be made all simple, candy-looking. Again, though, what are the requirements for Sugar and how does it compare?

So why did free healthcare turn up?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it because the people were better educated and knew how to ask for it? Would the healthcare changes merely made a workforce that could have done more menial work without the education? And, since wealth creation is usually preceded by innovation (it's why every company prides itself on being "innovative") and innovation requires education on the part of the innovator, would we have been left behind without education?

metamods

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the pwned whoever modded this flamebait