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Negroponte On OLPC's New Path, Plans For XO 3
waderoush writes "After laying off staff and splitting the organization in two, Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child effort may be hitting their stride again. In an interview with Xconomy, Negroponte says he has a new model for getting XO laptops to kids in Gaza and Afghanistan — and reveals more ideas about the planned XO 3 tablet and the future of books. 'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."
And seeing as I have no tablet or kindle or iPad or nook or whatever the hell, I shall keep reading them.
From my cold dead hands Mr Negroponte.
"'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says.""
He sounds totally rooted in reality to me.
I wonder how the XO is doing. The last time I heard about it, it was not doing well at all! Now the fella is talking about XO ver. 3! Talk of ambition.
OLPC needs to reel in its ambitions and focus on something it can deliver as promised. These guys are starting to corner the market in low cost vaporware and pipe dreams.
Seriously, why doesn't paste work in this stupid box any more? (Google Chrome 6.0.472.63, btw)
Anyway
Negroponte says he has a new model for getting XO laptops to kids in Gaza and Afghanistan
Now you see why the US didn't sign on to the treaty banning cluster bombs - they are planning to use them to deliver XO laptops.
It's cheaper, faster, and much safer for the delivery person.
Putting moderation advice in your
First I had to get up and retrieve it from its special storage shelf. I was surprised at how heavy it was. It didn't have any search functionality, so I had to manually find the index, and then find my search term in the index. The pages didn't have any backlighting, so I had to move it to face the light so I could read it easily. The contrast ratio was rather poor. Most of the words in the book were not indexed at all, but luckily my search term was present. I couldn't click it, and I had to manually find the correct page again. There wasn't any highlighting either, so I had to manually search the page too. I read my information, and them put the book back onto its storage shelf where it uses a ridiculously huge amount of space.
On the plus side, the resolution was high, but that's not enough to make up for all the other annoyances. Books are obsolete.
"Paper books are really dead -- they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,"
Huh? I've seen quite a few books recently. They're not gone.
"they're gone [...], they're creating tablets"
The paper books are creating tablets? Is he high on drugs or is that a literal translation that makes less sense in English?
If Israel isn't willing to allow basic supplies into the territory, is it realistic to think these laptops will somehow be let through?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Borrowed from the God is dead -Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead -God meme without apologies.
Books are quickly accessible, portable, need no batteries and just feel good in your hand while reading them.
I doubt books will ever die, unless we elect Sarah Palin for President.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Indeed, and liquid is not vaprous.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I wonder if you can run Duke Nukem Forever on the XO.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I left a copy of Little Women on the table beside a copy of Band of Brothers, and when I came back the net day, there were empty champagne bottles everywhere, and Big Chief tablets all over the room.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Or like radio, yeah, remember how TV killed radio? Or the VCR, remember how that killed the cinema?
Meh. Sure, the market for paper books might shrink back from its peak, but it's not disappearing, and certainly not overnight.
In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, What a maroon!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Paper Books:
Pros:
Cons:
eBooks/Book Readers:
Pros:
Cons:
Most of the Pros of one Medium are the Cons of the other. I miss any biggies?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
> 'Paper books are really dead -- they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the /. home page...
Oxford University's Bodleian Library has purchased a huge £26m warehouse to give a proper home to over 6 million books and 1.2 million maps
'Paper books are really dead — they're gone. And they're not being killed by tablets, they're creating tablets,' he says."
Um, just yesterday I ordered a paper book for myself. About 2 weeks ago I loaned a whole box of books to someone (I'm expecting them back in January) and my university booklist threatens to take the rest of my money.
I don't think paper books are dead at all.
I know someone that has a tablet, and I've fiddled around with it for a while. It's not nearly as good as a physical paper book. I usually spread my books out while reading so that I can compare things, and a tablet would not allow that. The tablet I saw just doesn't have the reading space that my books have. It being smaller and so on. I'm sure there's tons more reasons why paper books are still better than tablets.
Tablets are pretty cool things though. They could replace books one day, but goodness knows they'll get locked down like so many other modern devices. At least I am certain that my physical books will always belong to me, and that I won't get sued for using it in a study group where everyone can see.
And may you step in it, Africa-hater!!!
Also Chrome 6.0.472.63 here. Paste has been incredibly spotty for me in Slashdot for a while now. Ugh.
Do people really take such over the top wheedling seriously? And why would an otherwise pretty sharp guy say such a narrowminded blindered thing? Books are doing just fine, despite the coolness factor of OLPC or tablets or handhelds. People like them, use them, buy then, and keep them. And 100 years from now they'll still have them, unlike most digital ephemera. We're still working on getting good conversion of writing to text, but preserving writing on paper was mastered a few thousand years ago.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Which would be a historical revisionists wet dream. Books have that nasty property of not being able to be revised or deleted remotely. Once printed, they're there forever (or at least until someone rounds them up and burns them).
I'm not saying tech like this is a bad thing, but when someone says "books are dead", and tablets and e-readers are the sole future of literature, you have to wonder what color the world is through their eyes. Tech should complement the world we live in, not completely replace what they can co-exist beside. If books were to be replaced completely by tablets and e-readers, there is a whole list of nasty consequences that come to mind.
The OLPC is a stupid idea. Plain and simple.
First of all, books in these countries are cheap. Student's aren't lugging around the hard cover, full-color, overpriced text books Americans get. They're printed in black and white, on ultra cheap newsprint. And for the dedicated student there's always access to a library, well, not always, but the option exists for some. But the most important thing here is that a book doesn't require electricity.
How many parents, in third world nations, are going to want their kids bringing home a computer that needs to be recharged? Electricity costs money and that's something many of these people lack. Supposedly the OLPC had a manual crank for charging it's batteries, but I'd be curious to know how much of a charge that could actually provide. And let's not get into the issue of localizing these devices and providing all the content they're going to need. What's the point of investing in developing these devices if they're only useful in 2 or 3 classes? The point is it's too much work and expense when a far simpler solution is to simply provide the schools with a computer lab.
You can buy a $100 desktop now and it will be more than adequate for these students' needs. And consider the situation: why do these students need computers? I'd argue it's not to improve their education, but provide them with important computer skills which may be valuable when they go out into the working world. Perhaps a side-benefit is to be exposed to a larger world, provided they have internet connection; that's another limitation with the OLPC. As much as people may despise Microsoft, if work environments use Windows extensively, these students are better served being exposed to computers in that environment. I fully understand the implications of chaining people to a particular OS, but I'm approaching this from a pragmatic standpoint: what will be most helpful to these students?
The OLPC is a noble idea. But it's a complicated answer to a problem that much has better solutions. The organization had an annual budget of $12 million, down to $5 million now. I'd love to know how much has been dumped into developing the computer, and how much more will be spent on this new version. All that money could have just gone to buying cheap PCs for these schools and there almost certainly would have been many millions more left to spend on improving these schools and building new ones.
"Seriously, why doesn't paste work in this stupid box any more? (Google Chrome 6.0.472.63, btw)"
Well there's your problem. It works just fine for me in Firefox 3.6.10. IMHO Chrome has gotten one thing right (splitting different tabs into different processes so you can kill them and get the memory back) and about a dozen other things wrong. Prime among them, switching back to Chrome after working on something else for a little while will cause my ENTIRE COMPUTER to freeze while Chrome slowly refreshes the page one scanline at a time. I'm really not surprised to hear it has other problems as well.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The best "burritos" I've had were in Monterey, CA, at the weekly farmers' market on Alvarado Street there. A local Indian restaurant (India's Clay Oven) always had a booth, with a big sign across the top: "When is a burrito not a burrito? When it's a naan burrito!" Mm, rogan josh, palak paneer, and basmati saffron rice all rolled up in a big piece of naan... Yummy.
And less gas than most any burrito autentico that I've had. :) Though beware the caca fuego if you get any of the super spicy curries!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
yeah, it doesn't in my chrome, either. drives me nuts.
1. Announce OLPC for low price
2. Obtain funding/donations
3. ????
4. Profit!
At least on the personal level, it seems that Negroponte is on the third iteration of this scheme, without actually having to produce much in the way of actual mass manufactured goods. Proof the P T Barnum was right.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I hear your points, but:
All of these (and many more) remain fundamental durability issues, and in all cases, dead-tree books come out on top (and with water, that could be taken quite literally). My argument is not that eBooks will never make it -- they already are making a market for themselves, and that market has lots of room to grow. My argument is instead that Negroponte is either a) speaking hyperbolically, or b) speaking via ventriloquism or via an interpreter, as he's clearly experiencing a rectal-cranial inversion.
Or maybe he's just being obtusely literal ("paper books are dead" = "dead-tree books"?), and we've all just missed his deadpan humor.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That's entirely possible, but also not what I was refuting.
My point wasn't that eBooks won't grow; the market for them is definitely growing. My point is that paper books are not about to disappear, and probably never will, so long as there are readers and some means of making paper.
But then again, maybe Negroponte is not claiming that paper books will disappear. Maybe he's just being obtusely literal ("paper books are dead" = "dead-tree books"?), and we've all just missed the joke.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I hear you, but the examples you give have a notable difference from the paper book vs. ebook comparison. Looking at digital cameras vs. film cameras and word processors vs. typewriters, and also CDs vs. audiotape (and now digital downloads vs. CDs), the new technologies rendered their forebears effectively extinct by fully covering the older techs' use cases, while offering some compelling new feature.
Conventional photographic film is difficult in many ways -- you can't see the picture until long after it's been taken, you wind up with many pictures you don't really want but still have to pay for development, the film itself might go bad, etc. etc. Typewriters have their own flaws -- the keys jam, the paper gets crinkled, the lines are off or crooked, the ink smears, corrections are a hassle, etc. Audiotape too -- you get cracks and pops, the tapes can get eaten, they just plain wear out, you have to take the time to fast-forward or rewind to get to where you want, etc. The replacement technologies resolve these shortcomings -- and, importantly, their new shortcomings are less or different enough that the new tech can fully supersede the old.
Ebooks do offer new compelling features that improve on dead-tree technology, true enough. I think this explains why the ebook market is growing, and will likely continue to grow. But ebooks also entail a raft of issues that paper books don't have -- power, relative fragility, DRM, data corruption, etc. For this reason, I expect paper books will continue far into the future, persisting in ways that audiotape, typewriters, and photographic film have not.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
But now how do I read my iPad for Dummies when I don't know how to turn this thing on?
As long as Negroponte remains in charge of his baby the OLPC will never really take off. Eventually iPad technology will become cheap enough for the Third World. Too bad we have to wait for that to happen.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
"including his assertion that tablets were not creating the market for e-books, but that it was rather the other way around"
People actually buy devices to use them for something? Surely you jest.
"The humanitarian donation idea, he says, is almost totally new."
Hey, why don't you call it a c-h-a-r-i-t-y ... kind of catchy don't you think?
"That’s very key. It’s not soft, but it’s bendable. The way to make something unbreakable is to have it be bendable."
Why didn't anyone think of this before? All these idiots making solid circuit boards that can 'break' ... what a great idea! A bendy unbreakable computer.
"The idea is that when you use the onscreen keypad, it gives you force feedback that feels like typing on a regular keyboard"
That's so simple and obvious it's ludicrous. But why not just make the keyboard pop up completely straight out of the screen? The would be so much better than silly force feedback.
"You want it unbreakable, no power, and always connected. And those are aspirations, but it’s the kind of thing we should be doing whether it’s at OLPC or MIT"
While we're at it, let's sell if for 20c instead of $200 and if it was fireproof and waterproof you could surf the web by the campfire in the rain in the middle of the desert!
"We may not ever build it"
Perish the thought.
"we don’t have to build a tablet. All we [might] have to do is threaten to build a tablet"
$5.6 million dollars well spent I'd say. Everyone should be donating to this project.
Genius, pure and unadulterated genius..
How are they getting around the blockade ? Do those things have spyware in them ?