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Venezuela Purchases a Million Intel Classmates
An anonymous reader submits news of the million-laptop order from Venezuela of Intel's version of the kid-friendly laptop. The computers are produced in Portugal. "The machines, rebranded 'Magellan,' will also come with Linux pre-installed as opposed to Windows XP. This order alone is 50% bigger than the entire OLPC project has managed to sell worldwide."
So now OLPC comes with windoze and classmates come with Linux? o_O
Tables have turned I gather!
Technology in education has a great deal of potential when you put a computer in each kids hands. The important part is ~$300 million is being spent on hardware. How much will the national government spend on infrastructure that will make it a success. Teacher training and lesson plans, maintenance and support, internet access.... It could be political, your kid now has a computer, but I doubt it will be a success as an educational tool without spending another chunk of money on making it work. By the way OLPC is the reason the classmate exists, and while some zealots will be angry that it isn't their piece of hardware, the real supporters of the OLPC project's mission will be happy to hear this.
Technology in education has a great deal of potential when you put a computer in each kids hands.
Computers don't change the intelligence of kids, but they may help their motivation.
You cannot educate a congenital idiot into being a genius. You can make him flip burgers faster however.
I think people are hoping that buying computers for kids is the "magic bullet" to somehow turn them all into middle-class level performers.
No scientific evidence exists that shows that will work.
Some useful research:
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Stephen Pinker -- proves beyond a doubt that intelligence and personality are almost exclusively heritable.
* The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray -- although the portion about race attracted the most media attention, the real point of the book is that intelligence in populations follows a distribution curve so that only a few are actually all that smart.
You can see why people go into "cognitive dissonance" when they see this evidence. We all like to think we can be anyone we want to be. But just like few are as handsome as Paul Newman, few are smart enough to achieve the kind of results that are desired.
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole.
Pentti Linkola
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Can't allow there to be so many AMD chips out there...
That's fair play under the rules of capitalism.
And if we want "freedom," we probably don't want a whole bunch of rules about what's fair play.
Then again, maybe we can do better than a capitalist system.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Although its popular on both left and right to demonise Chavez, I think his rule will have a long term positive effect. Regardless of the current state of Venezuela, the Missions he created are contributing to a healthier and better educated population which is the foundation of future success.
I predict he will be out in a few years, and Venezuela will continue on a roughly social democratic route. The idea that he is turning it into another Cuba is just absurd hysterical screeching from the elite he has pissed off by treating the Venezuelan poor like human beings for a change.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I know for a different reason.
All the best stuff I know I learned from cartoons.
Turns out that I'd never heard "Get Along, Little Doggie" before that, either.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
It's being sold to kids in primary school for 50 euros and it comes with an option for mobile internet, which you can buy from mobile carriers. If you're not a primary school student, well you've got to pay 285 euros for one.
The little I know about Portuguese culture brings me to expect a lot of these machines will be sold for %= EUR, but not to kids only. There's ways to abuse the system, and I suspect it will be abused.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
oh c'mon. you don't think if the same deal were offered in the U.S., U.K., or any other western nation that you wouldn't also have people abusing the system?
i mean, 285 euros is pretty affordable for most Americans, but i still see people going into stores to buy these for their "kids" and then just keeping the laptop for themselves. consumers want the best deal possible as well. that's the flip side of capitalism.
It's just more likely to happen in Portugal than in Sweden or Finland. I don't know enough about the US to say one way or the other. And in fact, the post you are attacking does not mention anything regarding the US.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Hello,
While I disagree with the usefulness of this programme as stated I have some comments on your remarks:
"We are talking about a 900 MHz refurbished Intel Classmate PC that is both ugly, heavy, and marketed as "built in Portugal", which is _not_!"
They are partially made in Portugal, which is better than not made in Portugal at all - from a Government POV companies that develop and build here should be favoured, and I agree. As for the ugly and heavy, so is the OLPC and pretty much every laptop in the segment, they're ultimate value is utilitarian.
"And the choice of operating systems is appalling! We can either stick with Window XP or Caixa Mágica, a portuguese GNU/Linux distribution that is horribly produced, horrible to use, horrible to maintain, but thrown around at every state sponsored GNU/Linux deployment. No wonder people dislike GNU/Linux after using Caixa Mágica..."
I disagree with your descrition. Instead of a Portuguese distribution that has been developed for years now and to some extent commercially successful and fully localised - not only language-wise but also in terms of local available ISPs and other peculiarities - they should have used something else? Like, let me guess, Ubuntu - which seems what everyone and their dog propose nowadays whenever they hear that something else is available?
This is exactly part of the reason why GNU/Linux user distributions more often then not fail when bundled: there is always a distro-du-jour that describes the one included as "horrible", and people just say "Fuck *this*, if even Linux users say this is braindead [because it uses apt/yum/emerge instead of yum/emerge/apt and other really life-defining stuff] I will just use Windows". Which, more often than not, they do.
it doesn't have to. i'm pointing out that you're attributing a universal human trait to the Portuguese people. either you're incredibly naive or just incredibly self deluded. i guarantee it's just as likely to happen in Sweden or Finland or any other nation for that matter as it is to happen in Portugal. the likelihood of people abusing the system for a better deal is 100% in any capitalist country.
and in the interviews i've watched of Chavez, he comes off as a surprisingly intelligent person--i had no idea national leaders could be like that.
Funny, I've watched some interviews of him, too. I think he sounds stark raving mad. I had no idea national leaders could be like that, either. XD
did i say there were no cultural differences? i'm simply saying that the trait you're describing is a universal _human_ trait, not a Portuguese one.
granted, i've never traveled to Europe, but i've traveled to different parts of Asia and spent a significant part of my life outside of the U.S. i've even spent most of childhood adjusting to the cultural differences between Taiwan and the United States. i know very well how different cultural values can affect a society's development. but some things are constant. as much as you'd like to look down on another society for what you perceive as cultural shortcomings, people are generally more alike than they are different. we're just socialized to not see the corruption which goes on in our own society. that is the result of your cultural lens.
some governments are indeed more corrupt than others, but people in capitalist societies possess certain traits regardless of what culture they were raised in. do you honestly think that greed and corruption are distinctly Portuguese characteristics? you don't think Swedish or Finnish CEOs embezzle from their companies or exploit the economic system to their advantage?