So don't hold back, share with the rest of us - how did your EEE PCs work out? Are you glad that you have them instead of OLPCs? In what ways? Will you be making more such decisions in the future?
C'mon, if there's anything this thread can use it's actual feedback from folks personally using this stuff. Spill.
Sorry if I went on a bit there, but I think that this is an important point re the penetration of the OLPC. I grew up in academia and have now lived long enough to see both of my parents comprehensively condemn the establishment cultures in which they worked. In fact, my mother ended up meeting with (among others) Robert Reich and then traveling to Nicaragua and several other countries investigating just this: the obstructions caused by the dominant culture of the ostensibly do-gooder world, especially as manifested by folks like the World Bank and the IMF. She recommends the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman as a good place to start.
If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.
Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.
Let me suggest a simple exercise. In fact, every bloody one of y'all out there in/.land would probably benefit from it. Pick up five or six issues of Business Week, Fortune, Time Magazine, and a few major other "shapers of opinion". Personally I would include some old and new issues of National Geographic and Smithsonion because they both have a pretty serious role in shaping how Americans see the world. I repeat, five or six issues of each. Count the pages of ads from Microsoft, Intel, General Motors, oil companies, and the other megacorps.
Now stop and reassess what sort of coverage we can expect from them.
And, yes, I did make my living for years working for ad agencies, Time, Inc, McGraw-Hill's magazine division, and various other mass media creating business.
Nice theory. And while we're at it, I want a pony.
Tell me, in what way can you show that the particular money that is being spent on OLPCs would otherwise be spent on health care? Do you say the same thing about the far larger amounts we pay for pet food? Or video games, perhaps? This isn't some sort of tidy little game with a big authority figure offering us one or the other; it's a bunch of folks looking at a world that has hundreds of basic problems and doing their best to address what they can.
And, oh, btw, if you're worried about health care, providing a device that will massively improve education about things like avoiding water contamination (and trust me, I've had to listen to plenty of aid workers who were stymied by the difficulty of teaching that one) will provide at least as much improvement in long-term and even medium term health as would spending the money on, say, sending doctors to treat malaria.
I would add a fourth category: simulations of real world phenomena. You will learn material properties better if you have a Finite Element Analysis tool that gives nice visual demonstrations of what happens if you put a girder in the wrong place and then weight it down. And make no mistake, this kind of thing can be just as educational for a fifth grader as it can for a cvil engineer.
I think the reason is that the OLPC was always a solution in search of a problem. It started out as "lets make a cheap laptop".
Not true. It "started out" as "how do we distribute information cheaply?" It works very well indeed at that. Among other things, it's a superb ebook reader, which a HUGE thing for kids in a place where they have a massive book shortage.
You, afaict, don't know a damn thing about the OLPC project and even less about project management for this kind of work. Now maybe I'm wrong, I've only worked on a few dozen tech development projects, only a few of which were related to education, but in my world, you start out with whatever cheap crap you can get your hands on, you modify it with stuff that you built yourself to get your proof of principle, and that is how you get your first data. Now, the truth is, I've seen projects done your way (sort of). In fact there are dozens of valid ways to test out a concept and different teams may equally validly choose different approaches.
How about you go off, actually learn something about the OLPC project and the developing world and maybe even learn the idea that maybe the world contains approaches you don't know yet and maybe a thing can be done in ways you're not used to and still be valid and then...
That, my friend, is what is known as a "third party opportunity". Feel free to put together a development team and step in (and up?) at any time. Succeed and horny kids in developing nations the world over will thank you.
it's probably unreasonable to give kids 1100+ macbooks:)
If by that you meant $1,100 macbooks, of course I agree. But isn't OS 9 pretty much freeware at this point? Or at least OS 8? Darwin obviously is. I must admit that I keep hoping that some country with none too much concern for IP will start making Mac OS clone laptops with tech circa, oh, 1998, or maybe Palm OS devices circa 2004 and start selling them really cheap.
Politically the World Health Organisation and the World Bank can't just ignore ministries, however corrupt they think they are
I'm not entirely sure about those two, but as for governments, I'm not sure that I believe that anymore. We've seen an awfully consistent trend of wealthy government/NGO officials saying that they "can't" when what they really mean is "it would be awkward and we just don't do that kind of thing".
Seriously, given the body count in any major famine or disaster or simply grossly poverty-stricken area, there is just as much at stake and on a timescale no longer than Bosnia. That being the case, why the frak aren't we just bloody well making hundreds of thousands of aid packages and just dropping them over every damn starving village? Little packets of not just food, but multivitamins, solar powered minipumps, LED lamps and radios, ceramic filters for water purifiers with instruction in the local language about how to build them, reflective material and frames for building solar ovens, and so on. Maybe even include a stainless steel bowl or three and a few comics in the local language to encourage literacy.
We could fit in a cubic foot enough to change the mortality rate of an entire village. And we could pack it all in another cubic foot of bubble wrap that would let us drop it without parachutes and have the bubble wrap itself (excellent insulation) be a part of the package. And the whole shebang would not only cost a hundred bucks or so per to make, we could have much of it made in factories in the region, providing real jobs doing real work instead of just handing over charity.
I just don't goddamn well believe anymore that if we airdropped a few dozen of them over a village at three in the morning while airdropping liquor and money around the camps of the local thugs, we would still have the same level of suffering that we now see. And having looked into the technology approaches of most of the big charities, I wouldn't put them in charge of speccing a junior high school prom let alone hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects each.
Yeah, that's true. But like in any form of hacking, before changing things, you should find out how the system already works. I'm just a tiny little educational publisher but even I have made the time to put my products in front of appropriate users at every major step towards version 1.0, and then in front of teachers as that day came closer.
I really want the OLPC project to succeed, though the switch to a Microsoft OS as a standard install (note: NOT MANDATORY, ONLY STANDARD) has dimmed my enthusiasm some. But in no way that I've seen have they demonstrated the coherent action I would expect of a five person startup in a basement somewhere. This whole project looks to me like a serious case of diffusion of responsibility and ill-defined decision authority.
When that keyboard glitch turned up a while back, they should have been all over the place within days with a clearly written response, complete with Youtube videos and still images on Flickr under every possible keyword. When Intel started pushing the Classmate they should have (as Negroponte now acknowledges) either kept quiet or done a far better job of making their case. And now that the organization has effectively forked, is the Sugar team talking with Asus about a ruggedized version of the EEE running the OLPC OS and software set?
Like or hate Apple, from day one they had their evangelists out there when they were creating the Macintosh and every key related technology. Maybe somebody should send the OLPC folks a few dozen copies of Kawasaki's first book. Hell, maybe Lasermaster still has a few copies of their reissue sitting around.
But even so, let's keep in mind that all they need to do is keep on their current curve for another year or so and, one way or another, the project should be fine. This kind of thing genuinely is non-linear and now that we have several reference specs for UMPCs, at least one of which is open source, maybe the "success" will end up being an ecosystem of several devices created from aspects of several of the current UMPC approaches, running various OSes, that the current OLPC team members will use to carry out programs under different names and different leadership but achieving the original goal. And let's remember that Asus' president said that he was inspired to create his EEE line by the OLPC project, which is itself a certain kind of success that the project has already reached.
I've used Aerons and all the other famous ones and ended up buying a wooden office chair from (I guess) the thirties.
What makes it work so well? A few things. First of all, the proportions are right. Add me to the list of folks who say that the chair MUST match the person using it. And to the list saying that the adjustments on an Aeron reliably slip.
Secondly, and this is huge, it has a "defective" seat post that is "all wobbly". The join between the vertical threaded rod that holds the chair up and the metal frame beneath it is loose. This forces me to push back a bit and to keep adjusting my lower back. This gives me all the advantages of one of those ball dealies while still having good armrests, a backrest, and all the comforts of a proper chair.
Thirdly, due to an injury from a few years back, I need to keep my legs elevated, which helps me press back against the chair. What is my legrest? One of those big plastic shipping crates with the folding tops. My experience has been that it's all about height and (hard for those of you in offices) circulation. So in addition to my legrest, I never wear shoes while I'm working.
Lastly, my chair, like all good old wooden ones, has a "waterfall" front, which slopes down and doesn't press again the back of my knees. This, too is crucial.
I had back trouble for years but the combination of this chair, a good leg rest, and a desk setup that keep my screen elevated and my keyboard and mouse not too high seems to have fixed it.
Hmm. Sounds like violent revolution to me. I've studied a few dozen of those and it seems like they never turn out the way the original enthusiasts expect. I would hate to think what our equivalent of the Bolsheviks would be and who would be shipping our "Lenin" in with a sealed aircraft.
I do know that having just once had to run down a street as gunfire went off, mobs set buildings on fire (damnit, I liked that McDonalds!), and the local government was "threatened" by idiots with loaded weapons, I have no desire whatsoever to see it happen here in the U.S. In my experience this kind of thing seems much more romantic and "cool" to folks who have never huddled in a basement stairwell wondering if they're about to get shot.
I wondered about that. Maybe the best approach would be to use forced air from small vents to change the effective "shape" of the vehicle as is done on the wings of some new aircraft. Maybe even an outer layer of fabric with "gills". Of course if the dynamically adjustable inner frame gets complex enough, so as to maximize variability, that frame gets heavier and heavier. Are the changes done with nitinol? Solenoids? How exactly do they change shape? Rotating around an axis with a stepper motor?
I dunno. Frankly, my first thought, having been thinking for a while of having a custom two-seater built with a styrofoam shell with some sort of rigid outer coat (been thinking of hiring local setbuilders to make it) was "damn! scooped again!" But having seen this I may yet build a little beastie of my own with a fabric shell. And since mine would just be meant for tooling around Portland, mostly on local streets, it doesn't matter to me all that much what it does above forty miles an hour. And doping standard cordura would give me something tough enough and flexible enough for my purposes. The only concern would be to line it with batting and Reflectix to make it sound and temperature insulated. Maybe I'll just make segments from yard sale quilts.
Lincoln's suspending of habeus corpus was actually not that widespread, nor were most of his other questionable activities, none of which even began to reach the scale of Bush's ones. As for FDR, well, first of all, we really did have a world war going on and secondly, yeah, no sh*t, and look at how much trouble his actions have gotten us into since. The "Military-Industrial Complex" that Bush is so tied to grew directly out of FDR's policies and his obsession with secrecy (not to mention the influence of Hoover) played a huge role in Truman getting suckered by the security establishment into creating so much of the core institutions that are so central to our current national security state. If FDR had lived a few years longer he probably would have faced impeachment hearings. He certainly had enough enemies. Gawd knows Churchill was out on his butt as soon as anybody was in a position to do so.
If you want to try that line of patter, might I suggest that you start with the Alien and Anti-Sedition Acts and Wilson's various illegal actions against folks like Eugene Debs.
Okay. That makes sense. But if he can be charged after he leaves office then doesn't that make it even more important to get the ball rolling as soon as possible?
Okay, maybe I'm misunderstanding you here. Are you saying that to impeach Bush makes it "routine"?
What would he have to have done for you to consider impeachment merited? And do you consider his actions so typical that we should assume that any standard that justifies impeaching him would, de facto, justify impeaching anybody simply for being president?
So, in your opinion, what is "the underlying issue"? I'm not just being snarky; I'm genuinely curious. What do you think the "real problem" is and what are you doing about it?
This is very relevant to/. indeed. Or have you never noticed the YRO section? Or the massive effect Michael Powell's sweetheart deals and auctions of spectrum have had on telecommunications? Or the impact on technology companies of H1-B visa policy, policy that affects disproportionately people in just the fields/.ers work in?
The Bush administration has played havoc with our infrastructure, with our laws, with our educational system, with our resource pools, with the cost of those resources, with the effectiveness of academic research, and with our ability to do business. If you don't understand that these things all are crucial to tech then maybe you should go back to your Visual Basic tutorial and leave the discussion to those of us who know better.
Slashdot Mirror
Or that they can't be bothered. And/or that this won't affect them.
C'mon, if there's anything this thread can use it's actual feedback from folks personally using this stuff. Spill.
If we are to rationally analyze the success or (comparative) failure of the OLPC, it is crucial to understand that the big NGOs are staffed by people who don't much care about the good of the poor. Many of these people are also vastly corrupt and tied into the regimes they are supposedly working to change; regimes that gain from having desperate, ignorant, weak populaces. Myanmar really isn't that anomalous.
Should the OLPC even try to get computers in through governments or would they be better trying to get the relevant officials bribed to just stand aside? I don't know. But we cannot understand the decisions of nations like Libya and Nigeria without starting with the assumption that the good the children is, at best, fourth or fifth on the list of things they looked at when saying yes or no to OLPC.
Personally, I first heard about Intel's tactics in a piece in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.
Now stop and reassess what sort of coverage we can expect from them.
And, yes, I did make my living for years working for ad agencies, Time, Inc, McGraw-Hill's magazine division, and various other mass media creating business.
Tell me, in what way can you show that the particular money that is being spent on OLPCs would otherwise be spent on health care? Do you say the same thing about the far larger amounts we pay for pet food? Or video games, perhaps? This isn't some sort of tidy little game with a big authority figure offering us one or the other; it's a bunch of folks looking at a world that has hundreds of basic problems and doing their best to address what they can.
And, oh, btw, if you're worried about health care, providing a device that will massively improve education about things like avoiding water contamination (and trust me, I've had to listen to plenty of aid workers who were stymied by the difficulty of teaching that one) will provide at least as much improvement in long-term and even medium term health as would spending the money on, say, sending doctors to treat malaria.
And maybe even a fifth: systems that interact with the real world like Intel's excellent microscope plugged into a digital camera with a USB link to a PC or things like Mindstorms that can actually get learners involved in measuring and controlling real world processes.
maybe I'm wrong, but it looks to me like the OLPC is excellently positioned to do both of these things.
Not true. It "started out" as "how do we distribute information cheaply?" It works very well indeed at that. Among other things, it's a superb ebook reader, which a HUGE thing for kids in a place where they have a massive book shortage.
You, afaict, don't know a damn thing about the OLPC project and even less about project management for this kind of work. Now maybe I'm wrong, I've only worked on a few dozen tech development projects, only a few of which were related to education, but in my world, you start out with whatever cheap crap you can get your hands on, you modify it with stuff that you built yourself to get your proof of principle, and that is how you get your first data. Now, the truth is, I've seen projects done your way (sort of). In fact there are dozens of valid ways to test out a concept and different teams may equally validly choose different approaches.
How about you go off, actually learn something about the OLPC project and the developing world and maybe even learn the idea that maybe the world contains approaches you don't know yet and maybe a thing can be done in ways you're not used to and still be valid and then...
Naw. Go away. You're clueless.
And you'll probably make buckets o' money.
If by that you meant $1,100 macbooks, of course I agree. But isn't OS 9 pretty much freeware at this point? Or at least OS 8? Darwin obviously is. I must admit that I keep hoping that some country with none too much concern for IP will start making Mac OS clone laptops with tech circa, oh, 1998, or maybe Palm OS devices circa 2004 and start selling them really cheap.
I'm not entirely sure about those two, but as for governments, I'm not sure that I believe that anymore. We've seen an awfully consistent trend of wealthy government/NGO officials saying that they "can't" when what they really mean is "it would be awkward and we just don't do that kind of thing".
Seriously, given the body count in any major famine or disaster or simply grossly poverty-stricken area, there is just as much at stake and on a timescale no longer than Bosnia. That being the case, why the frak aren't we just bloody well making hundreds of thousands of aid packages and just dropping them over every damn starving village? Little packets of not just food, but multivitamins, solar powered minipumps, LED lamps and radios, ceramic filters for water purifiers with instruction in the local language about how to build them, reflective material and frames for building solar ovens, and so on. Maybe even include a stainless steel bowl or three and a few comics in the local language to encourage literacy.
We could fit in a cubic foot enough to change the mortality rate of an entire village. And we could pack it all in another cubic foot of bubble wrap that would let us drop it without parachutes and have the bubble wrap itself (excellent insulation) be a part of the package. And the whole shebang would not only cost a hundred bucks or so per to make, we could have much of it made in factories in the region, providing real jobs doing real work instead of just handing over charity.
I just don't goddamn well believe anymore that if we airdropped a few dozen of them over a village at three in the morning while airdropping liquor and money around the camps of the local thugs, we would still have the same level of suffering that we now see. And having looked into the technology approaches of most of the big charities, I wouldn't put them in charge of speccing a junior high school prom let alone hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects each.
I really want the OLPC project to succeed, though the switch to a Microsoft OS as a standard install (note: NOT MANDATORY, ONLY STANDARD) has dimmed my enthusiasm some. But in no way that I've seen have they demonstrated the coherent action I would expect of a five person startup in a basement somewhere. This whole project looks to me like a serious case of diffusion of responsibility and ill-defined decision authority.
When that keyboard glitch turned up a while back, they should have been all over the place within days with a clearly written response, complete with Youtube videos and still images on Flickr under every possible keyword. When Intel started pushing the Classmate they should have (as Negroponte now acknowledges) either kept quiet or done a far better job of making their case. And now that the organization has effectively forked, is the Sugar team talking with Asus about a ruggedized version of the EEE running the OLPC OS and software set?
Like or hate Apple, from day one they had their evangelists out there when they were creating the Macintosh and every key related technology. Maybe somebody should send the OLPC folks a few dozen copies of Kawasaki's first book. Hell, maybe Lasermaster still has a few copies of their reissue sitting around.
But even so, let's keep in mind that all they need to do is keep on their current curve for another year or so and, one way or another, the project should be fine. This kind of thing genuinely is non-linear and now that we have several reference specs for UMPCs, at least one of which is open source, maybe the "success" will end up being an ecosystem of several devices created from aspects of several of the current UMPC approaches, running various OSes, that the current OLPC team members will use to carry out programs under different names and different leadership but achieving the original goal. And let's remember that Asus' president said that he was inspired to create his EEE line by the OLPC project, which is itself a certain kind of success that the project has already reached.
I've used Aerons and all the other famous ones and ended up buying a wooden office chair from (I guess) the thirties.
What makes it work so well? A few things. First of all, the proportions are right. Add me to the list of folks who say that the chair MUST match the person using it. And to the list saying that the adjustments on an Aeron reliably slip.
Secondly, and this is huge, it has a "defective" seat post that is "all wobbly". The join between the vertical threaded rod that holds the chair up and the metal frame beneath it is loose. This forces me to push back a bit and to keep adjusting my lower back. This gives me all the advantages of one of those ball dealies while still having good armrests, a backrest, and all the comforts of a proper chair.
Thirdly, due to an injury from a few years back, I need to keep my legs elevated, which helps me press back against the chair. What is my legrest? One of those big plastic shipping crates with the folding tops. My experience has been that it's all about height and (hard for those of you in offices) circulation. So in addition to my legrest, I never wear shoes while I'm working.
Lastly, my chair, like all good old wooden ones, has a "waterfall" front, which slopes down and doesn't press again the back of my knees. This, too is crucial.
I had back trouble for years but the combination of this chair, a good leg rest, and a desk setup that keep my screen elevated and my keyboard and mouse not too high seems to have fixed it.
I do know that having just once had to run down a street as gunfire went off, mobs set buildings on fire (damnit, I liked that McDonalds!), and the local government was "threatened" by idiots with loaded weapons, I have no desire whatsoever to see it happen here in the U.S. In my experience this kind of thing seems much more romantic and "cool" to folks who have never huddled in a basement stairwell wondering if they're about to get shot.
I'm curious. You ever been somewhere like that?
Now if you could make such things convincing and I could just hire you to do my sales presentations I'd be doing great ;->
Now if we can just get this stuff into the schools . . .
I dunno. Frankly, my first thought, having been thinking for a while of having a custom two-seater built with a styrofoam shell with some sort of rigid outer coat (been thinking of hiring local setbuilders to make it) was "damn! scooped again!" But having seen this I may yet build a little beastie of my own with a fabric shell. And since mine would just be meant for tooling around Portland, mostly on local streets, it doesn't matter to me all that much what it does above forty miles an hour. And doping standard cordura would give me something tough enough and flexible enough for my purposes. The only concern would be to line it with batting and Reflectix to make it sound and temperature insulated. Maybe I'll just make segments from yard sale quilts.
What good has Bush done?
Lincoln's suspending of habeus corpus was actually not that widespread, nor were most of his other questionable activities, none of which even began to reach the scale of Bush's ones. As for FDR, well, first of all, we really did have a world war going on and secondly, yeah, no sh*t, and look at how much trouble his actions have gotten us into since. The "Military-Industrial Complex" that Bush is so tied to grew directly out of FDR's policies and his obsession with secrecy (not to mention the influence of Hoover) played a huge role in Truman getting suckered by the security establishment into creating so much of the core institutions that are so central to our current national security state. If FDR had lived a few years longer he probably would have faced impeachment hearings. He certainly had enough enemies. Gawd knows Churchill was out on his butt as soon as anybody was in a position to do so.
If you want to try that line of patter, might I suggest that you start with the Alien and Anti-Sedition Acts and Wilson's various illegal actions against folks like Eugene Debs.
So what do we do now?
Okay. That makes sense. But if he can be charged after he leaves office then doesn't that make it even more important to get the ball rolling as soon as possible?
What would he have to have done for you to consider impeachment merited? And do you consider his actions so typical that we should assume that any standard that justifies impeaching him would, de facto, justify impeaching anybody simply for being president?
Oh, and btw, he has yet to be arrested or jailed.
Though we can certainly hope ;->
So, in your opinion, what is "the underlying issue"? I'm not just being snarky; I'm genuinely curious. What do you think the "real problem" is and what are you doing about it?
That sounds like a good enough reason to me.
The Bush administration has played havoc with our infrastructure, with our laws, with our educational system, with our resource pools, with the cost of those resources, with the effectiveness of academic research, and with our ability to do business. If you don't understand that these things all are crucial to tech then maybe you should go back to your Visual Basic tutorial and leave the discussion to those of us who know better.