Slashdot Mirror
Negroponte Hints At Paper-Like Design For XO-3
waderoush writes "In May 2008, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, unveiled an e-book like design for the second-generation XO Laptop, consisting of a pair of facing touchscreens. In a new e-mail interview, Negroponte says that design has been thrown out, and that instead the foundation is working on version '1.75' of the existing green-and-white laptop with a more powerful processor, as well as a '3.0' version that would look 'more like a sheet of paper.' Negroponte also addressed a range of other questions about the OLPC project, including the significance of the project to make 1.6 million e-books readable on the XO laptop and the organization's push to reach more children in Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."
I think that in any third-world country access to "open source" text books on any subject at zero extra cost would be more important than the actual "educational computer" functionality. It makes sense that the primary design goal should be that it is a good ebook reader. It looks neat and at $75 it is a fraction of the cost of current readers ... I want one!
From the OLPC website:
They even go on to say that this is about education, not laptops. So why are they working on building these devices when if all they want is a cheap Panasonic Toughbook? It seems that instead of trying to build cheaper devices, they could partner with a company (like Panasonic) to provide this kind of technology on the cheap.
By focusing so much on the technology, we are forgetting that the purpose of these devices is to enable kids around the world to become more connected. This can be done with an old Toshiba Satellite laptop from 2001, you don't need the latest and greatest software to access the Internet.
Dual screens? E-paper? Touchable displays?
Surely what you really need to make it cheap is cheap components and low R&D costs. Toughen up a netbook for god's sake! At the time the last OLPC came to everyone's attention, it was a fairly revolutionary idea. Then Asus released the Eee range and others quickly followed suit. Nearly all of them make the OLPC look like last year's trash and for not much price difference.
What's that you say? You have a better version coming next year? Well, thanks for being so honest - we'll put our checkbook back in our pocket rather than giving you money for the obsolescent model now.
Oh, what? There'll be an another new version soon after that? Well, that's just great! Give us a call back if and when it's ever available - we'll do lunch.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So why not make individual units which can optionally be connected together to then function as a 2-display unit?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Yah, at least make the laptop edible!
Really? Are you serious? Do you think the likes of AMD, Intel, HP, Asus, Dell or ANY other tech company (including OLPC) is ever going to say that they're not going to make better stuff next year? People buy now because they have or perceive an immediate need for such a device. Obsolescence is just part of the cycle of technology that has to be accepted at the time of investment. I will, however, make an exception for you if you're posting by abacus.
When you're a computer scientist, your most effective path to help others is to leverage your computer science knowledge. Attempting to fix the world hunger problem without the appropriate background would be a foolish waste of time.
Then again OLPC has been a foolish waste of time so far, so it may not have mattered either way.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yea, because keeping them ignorant of computers, unable to access huge amounts of knowledge about farming, irrigation, planting techniques, home building techniques, and plumbing best practices is the way we want to go here. I suppose to you it's best if we just shovel rice at them until we fall on hard times as a society ourselves and aren't able to anymore, then they just starve to death.
To you all the internet is is Facebook and porn I guess, but if you start googling things about how to build the base foundations of a society I think you would be surprised. There is a plethora of information from road building to aqueduct construction on the internet.
huge amounts of knowledge about farming, irrigation, planting techniques, home building techniques, and plumbing best practices is going to change fuck all in a place like Ethiopia when all they need is rain !
Sometimes, unfortunately, shovelling rice at them is all that can keep them alive.
Seriously? I thought the world had gotten past the notion that computers were frivolous toys or first-world luxuries.
The truth is, food aid doesn't really work, at least by itself. You feed the current population, don't solve any of the systemic problems that led to the hunger, and you end up with another generation of hungry people.
What the developing world needs is development and mass empowerment. And that means, among other things, education. If you know of a tool that packs more educational potential into a less expensive package than a $100 networked computer system that's resistant to the elements, requires little or no supporting infrastructure, and can be preloaded with large quantities of information relevant to the populations it's given to, please name it.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Imagine if it were possible to do more than one thing at a time. Then we could provide food aid as needed, AND work on raising education levels.
Nah, it'd never work.
Yes, unfortunately, in a place like Ethiopia which is so volatile weather-wise, and so much of the basic necessities like food and clean water is dependent on having a good rainfall each year, the best (and possibly most cost effective) thing in the long run they could do is move everyone somewhere else, and cordon off the whole damn place as uninhabitable.
Only a non-profit could take the risk of a new form factor that no one thought they would need or want. Laptops kept getting bigger and bigger. Who knew people would once again want to put up with tiny keys and bizarre resolutions. Actually there are many who bemoan some of the sacrifices now.
I am still awaiting the netbook craze to settle down into a form which the majority thinks is both very portable and easily accessible. Its getting close.
As for why N. wants a new device, because its far easier to get money for tech than books.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What's that you say? You have a better version coming next year? Well, thanks for being so honest - we'll put our checkbook back in our pocket rather than giving you money for the obsolescent model now.
And what reasonable company doesn't come out with a "better version" of whatever they sell next year?
I just can't help thinking that sorting out such basic problems as hunger and poverty...
The only real solution to these problems is education. Everything else is just a temporary fix.
huge amounts of knowledge about farming, irrigation, planting techniques, home building techniques, and plumbing best practices is going to change fuck all in a place like Ethiopia when all they need is rain !
Sometimes, unfortunately, shovelling rice at them is all that can keep them alive.
The world is not neatly divided into "have an SUV" and "on the brink of starvation". The OLPC project (now rebranded to lowercase olpc according to TFA, for whatever bizarre reason) is targeted at places where children have their basic food needs fulfilled, and have a school they can go to that at least sometimes gets electricity. One of the biggest deployments is in Peru, for instance. If you feel that shoveling rice at ethiopians is the only worthy humanitarian cause, please put your time and/or money where your mouth is and do something about it.
"I just can't help thinking that sorting out such basic problems as hunger and poverty should be slightly higher on the list than whether they can play Facebook and post on Twitter."
Shouldn't it also be more important than you posting on /. then? How many orphans have YOU fed today?
Paruro, Peru, is a beautiful town of about 5,000, high in the Andes. It's the sort of place that hasn't existed in in the US for a century, where there are more horses than cars, everyone cooks with firewood, and children and dogs run loose in the streets. They have an Internet cafe there, all of a dozen PCs sharing a satellite link. While stopping in occasionally to check my work email I saw kids enrolling in classes in the University in Arequipa (otherwise two day's travel each way to enroll), a grandma in Lima met her first grandbaby on webcam, farmers checking prices to see whether it was better to sell in Cusco or Abancay, merchants checking on the status of goods they had ordered, THE mechanic looking up a manual for a backhoe, a mother chatting with her daughter in the university in Paris, and a lady looking for patterns for wedding dresses. If you think the Internet's just good for porn you have no imagination at all.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
When you're a computer scientist, your funnest path to help others is to leverage your computer science knowledge.
What exactly are plumbing's best practices as applied to an old well a few miles away?
Considering that the developed world hasn't been able to provide food for everyone who needs it why should we add another task to not complete?
You know, I believe I've worked at start-ups like that ... they didn't make it.
Unfortunately, most of the systemic problems developed because of the actions of more developed nations. Education can't solve it beyond the extent that some lucky ones might be able to escape and become part of the system.
huge amounts of knowledge about farming, irrigation, planting techniques, home building techniques, and plumbing best practices is going to change fuck all in a place like Ethiopia when all they need is rain !
Sometimes, unfortunately, shovelling rice at them is all that can keep them alive.
Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
The XO can teach them to build a better society. Shoveling rice at them just increases their dependence on other countries.
They don't make a point of marketing it to end customers - and in this case, the governments are the purchasers - until they're ready to sell it though. In particular, they don't boast about how much cheaper it'll be than the current model. Really, there's not much else Negroponte could do to kill sales of the XO 1 other than boasting that the XO "1.75" will cause 30% less cancer.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Really. After all this time I still see all these other posts where people *just don't get it* on why being connected to the net, or why being able to give kids hundreds of textbooks on a little machine, etc, isn't valuable. The folks here in the US who live rural get the same routine, from apparently the same sort of people, "why should they need or want broadband way out there" etc. It's like, if you aren't already rich (by entire world standards), live in a heavily urban area, and have all the toys and gadgets and gizmos and technology you can want, that you are supposed to remain stuck at the "send them bags of food then forget about it" levels forever. "Oh look Buffy, how quaint, those cute little backward natives are playing on a computer. Why, there are still goats walking in the street, this is unacceptable though, they should be stripped of those time wasting machines that they couldn't possibly understand or make intelligent use of, and made to go back the way they were!"
Really, it sounds just like that to me sometimes.
I find it rather patronizing/condescending and jingoistic (in a broad sense) and really quite naive of those people to keep thinking that. Access to the net and having access to a computer are just a wonderful thing for *everyone*, you at least get a shot at doing something useful with it, like your examples, it doesn't matter where they are. And for kids in some poor area, it just might give them a little hope, some fun, some education, and who knows from there, but to feel part of the 21st century has to be enabling to a large degree, even if the rest of your life is more rough than not..
The trouble with the OLPC is that it's mostly a vehicle so that Negroponte can hang out with heads of state and such. Actually shipping product is secondary. It's all about national-level deals. Remember when OLPC had a "buy 2, get 1, give 1" program, and they botched basic order fulfillment?
Those things should be in bubble-packs alongside the graphing calculators, with the price down to the original $99 by now. They don't need a fancier model. They need a cheaper model. They're being run over by the netbook industry. Netbooks are down to $100 if you buy in bulk from China. Look on Alibaba.
Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.
Unless there's no fish... tada welcome to the problem!
Twitter in the third world:
What are you doing?
Starving to death
What are you doing?
Still starving to death
What are you doing?
...
Apparently to raise money among the "money-ed" people, non-profits often throw elaborate parties for the money-folks to press the flesh and be seen (and eat some fancy meal and get to experience some donated entertainment).
Seems to me that if you really wanted to help people in far off places, you would just write a check. However, that apparently doesn't keep all the local mouths properly fed (e.g., the executives and workers for the non-profits, the preferred catering and event planning companies of the money-folks, the professional fund-raising telemarketers, etc, etc)
Actually I often find it quite amusing to read thing like this... "In AIP's view, $35 or less to raise $100 is reasonable for most charities." To me, that's a sad statement on the efficiency of typical fund raising activities. It's almost as if many charities exist mostly to service/employ their executives and workers, rather than actually doing whatever beneficial work they should be doing.
If you also take in consideration that the money that charities/non-profits raise is tax-advantaged (donor gets a tax break and the charity doesn't have to pay tax on the "income"), vs say like a company that has to get money from the customer after tax and additionally has to pay tax on it, the situation is actually quite sad.
Actually, I don't fully blame Negroponte. It's really the system of non-profit charities that makes this type of business plan even remotly viable. It's a good gig if you can get it, too bad we are all (collectively) paying for it with tax preferences.
-
two screens making up two pages like a book - allow me to read as I am used to.
two screens allowing one for reference data, the other for the input to an application -
- or in the case of lecture - one page for the teacher, one for the student
one of the sreens duplicating as touch sensitive keyboard allow me to enter my text
and 1.6 Mio books available plus the Gutenberg Project allow me to read ( as lot )
I would have preferred a lower-power-guzzling CPU
and as an option solar cell case to allow me to read my SF stories on the beach without dying batteries!
Education... and fair international trade rules.
As long as local non-tech products continue getting heavily subsidized by first world governments, third world can't compete fairly. They can't compete in tech, for lacking infrastructure and money; so if they can't compete in non-tech, they are busted for life. And they can't charge heavy tariffs on foreign products to level the playfield, because they have a debt to pay to their main competitors.
Nowadays in some countries it is not an education issue: they have knowledge. It's a matter of fixing a false free market, so it ceases to be free only for the rich.
Of course, having initiatives like the OLPC can be very useful for those who are lagging, and useful still for those who got it right. Getting something cheaper is allways useful, isn't it?