In 1971, this might have been acceptable: it was 20 years before the advent of the Web, and the threat model for most computer users was entirely different than the one that applies today. But how, then, is it a surprise that we can't stop viruses and malware now, when our defenses have remained largely unchanged from thirty-five years ago?
Uh, actually, the computers with UNIX-like security permissions are doing pretty well. It's that pesky one that abandoned it that gets all the virii and malware...
It's just a style thing, check this thread on The Economist's take on it : http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=326 (if you had the linkification plugin, that'd be a link for you)
The most important thing is consistency, don't flip flop between referring to it as singular and plural, pick one, and go with it (or them).
Also, the OLPC has a target audience of 6-16 year olds. Sure, 6 year olds shouldn't be locked in to learning spreadsheets, much less Excel specifically, but, for the upper end of the spectrum, some actual marketable skills for the kids not interested in programming in Scratch or whatever other wonderful things might come out of playing with the OLPC, just might be useful.
You should also look at Koha (koha.org), another OSS library system. It's... a bit overly complicated I feel, and importing any exisiting data into it is a royal $%^$%&$^&$%###^$&#!! which makes you learn the marc library record system, but it's a powerful system, and - once you get it into your head - easy to modify for your own needs.
I agree; I shouldn't have to pay iGo or someone like $10/head to get a universal power adapter for my laptops and cell phone and such. It's pure insanity the hassle this causes consumers
This game is just begging for a few good usermods. Satan takes over the world; and now that all the hate-mongering and murderous christians are gone, it's a quite nice place thanks!
It's censorship, so I hope the game stays on the shelves. I'm glad some christians are put off by it. Perhaps they could direct their energies at reminding the religious right factions that their core values are being nice, not naughty.
The problem isn't if it fails or doesn't fail. I hope it doesn't fail; it has huge potential to reduce illiteracy and improve education globally. The problem is that if it does fail, the governments which were forced to buy them in lots of millions will be so mired in debt (*even if* you're only counting the $100/laptop cost and the magic dust that escapes from power bricks coalesces to do all the training, provide all the Internet, and so on), that they'll be at the mercy of the loaning organization (well, more - many of these countries already provide the majority of their tax income to loan repayment at the cost of their domestic social programs).
This is untested technology and barely-tested educational philosophy. Let's see some pilot projects before we indebt these kids and their kids in loan repayments for a project that might work.
The really sad part is, had he stuck with it, the Right would have struck him down, and he would have become more powerful than they could have imagined.
He could have been an Independent candidate, adopted by the mostly-centrist Democrats, or brought back in to the GOP fold once they finish self-destructing.
I'm hardly an armchair critic myself; I worked on countless projects in the Caribbean while I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and networked with a lot of other IT volunteers worldwide (mostly to respond to some Peace Corps bureaucracy problems, sadly). Governments have a lot to lose by not getting their hands in the pot, not sharing the pot with local and semi-local business (say, local telecom monopolies), loss of face to their constituents if it is not seen as coming "from" the gov't, and loss of control over education processes and information flow into the country. I mean, I don't think the US government would be too thrilled about any foreign nation's NGO coming in and giving unfettered Internet access and laptops to all the children in all the schools. (I can hear the "OMG the pr0n~ They're perverting our children with their pr0n!!!" cries just thinking about it).
That all being said, the governments are the ones that will be signing the loan papers to pay for all of this.
Did the Cambodian project pay any of the local help? I mean, getting local volunteers is great, but not always doable. Even high-talented local people often have to make the choice between volunteering their time and feeding their families through paid work. I worked closely with the local Linux Users Group, but it was a sadly very, very small group, all of whom were incredibly dedicated to learning and spreading Linux, but they had real jobs to go to and bills to pay, also.
I'm rambling - my point is that these complications will crop up in every country, and they all add to the bottom line of implementation costs.
First, the costs are all in dollars. They should be what it would really cost in terms of local currency and actual costs of local people doing it
A USD $100 laptop costs USD $100 wherever you buy it. The Internet costs are from a global average of local ISP costs, the USAID numbers used in training were used in-country to pay primarily for local staff and resources, though as a USAID contract they were required to source some materials from US companies. This is unfortunately standard practice for such contracts.
The cost of the laptop, as I understand it $100 and not a cent more. I question the $148 quoted price. Well, that came straight from Negroponte. The $108 is extracting setup costs from OLPC's memorandum of understanding (MOA) with the Libyan goverment - the first actual numbers released. Note that these setup costs are probably things like satellite dish and mesh network repeater installation, classroom server setups, and whatnot.
I think if you want to calculate a budget, you need to just calculate a nice salary and room and board plus unlimited travel expenses for a few extremely stubborn and talented people. They will then start out and figure out what it really will cost at the absolute minimum.
This alone is some significant "training" expenses. Sure, the docs are free, I'd hope at least. Room and board and unlimited travel expenses for some talented people? That's not cheap. There's a lot of costs in training, whether it be integration with existing educational curricula, training teachers, and so on. If you're sending out a million or more units, it will take more than a "few" people doing even the most basic training. These will be geographically dispersed, it's just not that simple.
Included in the project should be maybe two fulltime connections to the Internet for redundancy, the rest can be sneakernet and trickling through ad hoc.
Two fulltime internet connections? Per country? Per region? Per school? Sorry, I don't really understand your Internet chunk. Sure, there's a mesh, sure, there's sneakernet capability, and if they don't have the Internet not all is lost, just, well, a lot of the utility that the project has been advertising.
Oh, I don't personally think it could prevent at all; at best it will reduce the duration by providing media coverage=> increased number of people knowing about it => more of a political issue in governments that have the ability to step in and stop things.
I mean, there's a LOT, and I mean, more than I've been fortunate enough to see myself ever before, of techno-utopianism that goes with the OLPC (and web2.0 too), and how these things will change the world and save the children and so on. I've gotten called out for being a wet blanket on this, but I've also seen computers distributed to schools used for status symbols in the principal's office (keyboard cord still in original plastic-and-twist-ties, even), and I've seen the manhours that it takes to deal with "donated" 486 computers - hundreds of dollars to get them out of customs, then days and days of hard, nasty, sweaty labor swapping out broken parts, installing an OS from floppies (no CD, no network card, no modem card, no USB...) (and I'd forgotten how friggin sharp the metal edges used to be!), just to get a craptacular computer that doesn't run anything that's been released in the past decade, doesn't interoperate, and looks so frankenstein that no one wants it...
OK, ranting, sorry.
Anyhow. Citizen journalism is good. Witness the speed with which the story about the UCLA cop that tasered a student got around the net thanks to the provocative cell phone video. Remember Rodney King! The problem is... uh, what happened to that UCLA cop, anyhow?
So basically, you're on track in my opinion. Reporting is good, but action is what actually has to happen for things to change. But most development agencies don't like to actually be tied to quantitative hard data anyhow, because the link between development aid and economic improvement requires a lot of twisty analysis and multiple regressions to find anything that's significant.
My favorite was when the MIT Technology Review compared Negroponte (who's received a lot of funding to develop the OLPC and will be selling them in huge batches) to Andrew Carnegie, who used questionable robber-baron business practices to make tons of money, and then funded the building of libraries via grants nationwide, and then set up a maintenance grant provided that the city also contributed funds to the ongoing support of the library.
Anyhow. They're selling machines, at an overall low cost (though there's not much work on the actual implementation part of them yet), without letting people do pilot projects in their own countries before signing on to buy millions of machines through World-Bank debt-financing. Woot.
While I'm on a rant; while I think the OLPC counter-point to Bill's "why can't they just use cell phones?" comment is valid; who want to read a book on a cell phone (Ok, BESIDES me, that's not the point) cell phones are great communication tools, but poor educational tools. Nevertheless, the whole OLPC-will-prevent-genocide is poorly phrased. Citizen journalism will reduce the risk of genocide (I'm not sure I even buy this point, media coverage of Darfur has certainly had mixed, at best, results w/r/t US policy); but OLPC doesn't => citizen journalism any more than cell phone video recording, TelSur style handicams, and so on.
1) Sure, Nick's been hitting the importance of Internet access a lot of recent, though.
2) I've seen enough plans for cheap Internet for development situations fall apart before or shortly after implementation that this seems reasonable. I think the demand will drive the costs down, but in many cases there are monopoly powers in control of the telecom infrastructure, with no desire or need to "compete" on prices. $135 would be a shock figure, except it's a global average of Internet costs in low-income countries for 40 hours/month of dialup.
3) The training costs are fixed, spread out over the 5-year lifespan, you can amortize that over whatever time period you like.
4) I think 5/100 laptops needing replacement is reasonable, especially as this incorporates laptops stolen and lost, as well as just broken beyond repair. I think the design of the OLPC laptops will actually prove itself incredibly well-done in the field. Normal laptop failure rate in hot and dusty climates is, I'd posit, much closer to 20% or higher if they're not well taken care of. I burnt out a battery and two fans in 2 years in the Caribbean, and I treated my machine pretty nicely. Theft will be a problem, as will acts of nature like ants and floods.
Oh GODS no, M$ would be ten times more expensive, and be proprietary, with closed source and...
right, no. M$ would be a disaster. However, there's rumbling that MS has a few models and is trying to put WinCE or somesuch on them. I for one hope it doesn't work. Having a monoculture of few billion Linux-based boxes is scary enough; can you imagine the zombie army that a billion WinCE boxes would make? *shudder*
Textbooks are a sunk cost, people understand, for the most part, how to use them. They've been a central part of teaching paradigms for hundreds of years. They're also pretty durable. You can drop them, dunk them, and so on, and they never run out of batteries.
Of course, the OLPC crowd has done some impressive work at making their laptops perform up to spec. I doubt they're waterproof, but they're reasonably resilient, dust-resistant, and are self-powered. Fantastic. It's still a huge change in teaching methods to incorporate these into a classroom. Does that mean this shouldn't be done? NO! It means it should be planned a bit, reducing the risk of countries shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to switch to a new and untested technology.
Yes, those laptops were donated to the school, and the project received Negroponte's personal attention. Any project that you spend so much time on, working with the local community, is going to do much better. So, we need a few million clones of Nick, and we'll be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a bit confused by:
In 1971, this might have been acceptable: it was 20 years before the advent of the Web, and the threat model for most computer users was entirely different than the one that applies today. But how, then, is it a surprise that we can't stop viruses and malware now, when our defenses have remained largely unchanged from thirty-five years ago?
Uh, actually, the computers with UNIX-like security permissions are doing pretty well. It's that pesky one that abandoned it that gets all the virii and malware...
I want to patent prior art searches.
It's just a style thing, check this thread on The Economist's take on it : http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=326 (if you had the linkification plugin, that'd be a link for you)
The most important thing is consistency, don't flip flop between referring to it as singular and plural, pick one, and go with it (or them).
Hey, at least we know they're not relying on security through obscurity!
I run KDE (ok, now XFCE) un ubuntu on a box with 128MB. It's a bit slow, but it works.
Wait, you mean you're still buying RIAA-tainted CDs?
Darned whippersnappers with UIDs with more than a handful of digits!
I'm all in favor of the "here be dragons" Internet - maybe AOL will finally re-disconnect itself from it.
Also, the OLPC has a target audience of 6-16 year olds. Sure, 6 year olds shouldn't be locked in to learning spreadsheets, much less Excel specifically, but, for the upper end of the spectrum, some actual marketable skills for the kids not interested in programming in Scratch or whatever other wonderful things might come out of playing with the OLPC, just might be useful.
You should also look at Koha (koha.org), another OSS library system. It's... a bit overly complicated I feel, and importing any exisiting data into it is a royal $%^$%&$^&$%###^$&#!! which makes you learn the marc library record system, but it's a powerful system, and - once you get it into your head - easy to modify for your own needs.
I agree; I shouldn't have to pay iGo or someone like $10/head to get a universal power adapter for my laptops and cell phone and such. It's pure insanity the hassle this causes consumers
...take...that....back...
What about the high school science experiment where you dissolve the zinc core?
This game is just begging for a few good usermods. Satan takes over the world; and now that all the hate-mongering and murderous christians are gone, it's a quite nice place thanks!
It's censorship, so I hope the game stays on the shelves. I'm glad some christians are put off by it. Perhaps they could direct their energies at reminding the religious right factions that their core values are being nice, not naughty.
The problem isn't if it fails or doesn't fail. I hope it doesn't fail; it has huge potential to reduce illiteracy and improve education globally. The problem is that if it does fail, the governments which were forced to buy them in lots of millions will be so mired in debt (*even if* you're only counting the $100/laptop cost and the magic dust that escapes from power bricks coalesces to do all the training, provide all the Internet, and so on), that they'll be at the mercy of the loaning organization (well, more - many of these countries already provide the majority of their tax income to loan repayment at the cost of their domestic social programs).
This is untested technology and barely-tested educational philosophy. Let's see some pilot projects before we indebt these kids and their kids in loan repayments for a project that might work.
Yeah, it's gettin' time for a new one huh?
The really sad part is, had he stuck with it, the Right would have struck him down, and he would have become more powerful than they could have imagined.
He could have been an Independent candidate, adopted by the mostly-centrist Democrats, or brought back in to the GOP fold once they finish self-destructing.
Yeah; thanks for your reasoned response. This has been my first slashdotting and I feel like a small asian child yelling at a water buffalo .
I'm hardly an armchair critic myself; I worked on countless projects in the Caribbean while I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and networked with a lot of other IT volunteers worldwide (mostly to respond to some Peace Corps bureaucracy problems, sadly). Governments have a lot to lose by not getting their hands in the pot, not sharing the pot with local and semi-local business (say, local telecom monopolies), loss of face to their constituents if it is not seen as coming "from" the gov't, and loss of control over education processes and information flow into the country. I mean, I don't think the US government would be too thrilled about any foreign nation's NGO coming in and giving unfettered Internet access and laptops to all the children in all the schools. (I can hear the "OMG the pr0n~ They're perverting our children with their pr0n!!!" cries just thinking about it).
That all being said, the governments are the ones that will be signing the loan papers to pay for all of this.
Did the Cambodian project pay any of the local help? I mean, getting local volunteers is great, but not always doable. Even high-talented local people often have to make the choice between volunteering their time and feeding their families through paid work. I worked closely with the local Linux Users Group, but it was a sadly very, very small group, all of whom were incredibly dedicated to learning and spreading Linux, but they had real jobs to go to and bills to pay, also.
I'm rambling - my point is that these complications will crop up in every country, and they all add to the bottom line of implementation costs.
First, the costs are all in dollars. They should be what it would really cost in terms of local currency and actual costs of local people doing it
A USD $100 laptop costs USD $100 wherever you buy it. The Internet costs are from a global average of local ISP costs, the USAID numbers used in training were used in-country to pay primarily for local staff and resources, though as a USAID contract they were required to source some materials from US companies. This is unfortunately standard practice for such contracts.
The cost of the laptop, as I understand it $100 and not a cent more. I question the $148 quoted price.
Well, that came straight from Negroponte. The $108 is extracting setup costs from OLPC's memorandum of understanding (MOA) with the Libyan goverment - the first actual numbers released. Note that these setup costs are probably things like satellite dish and mesh network repeater installation, classroom server setups, and whatnot.
I think if you want to calculate a budget, you need to just calculate a nice salary and room and board plus unlimited travel expenses for a few extremely stubborn and talented people. They will then start out and figure out what it really will cost at the absolute minimum.
This alone is some significant "training" expenses. Sure, the docs are free, I'd hope at least. Room and board and unlimited travel expenses for some talented people? That's not cheap. There's a lot of costs in training, whether it be integration with existing educational curricula, training teachers, and so on. If you're sending out a million or more units, it will take more than a "few" people doing even the most basic training. These will be geographically dispersed, it's just not that simple.
Included in the project should be maybe two fulltime connections to the Internet for redundancy, the rest can be sneakernet and trickling through ad hoc.
Two fulltime internet connections? Per country? Per region? Per school? Sorry, I don't really understand your Internet chunk. Sure, there's a mesh, sure, there's sneakernet capability, and if they don't have the Internet not all is lost, just, well, a lot of the utility that the project has been advertising.
Dude, he pointed out slashdot. What, do you want mapquest directions to the dragons?
Oh, I don't personally think it could prevent at all; at best it will reduce the duration by providing media coverage=> increased number of people knowing about it => more of a political issue in governments that have the ability to step in and stop things.
I mean, there's a LOT, and I mean, more than I've been fortunate enough to see myself ever before, of techno-utopianism that goes with the OLPC (and web2.0 too), and how these things will change the world and save the children and so on. I've gotten called out for being a wet blanket on this, but I've also seen computers distributed to schools used for status symbols in the principal's office (keyboard cord still in original plastic-and-twist-ties, even), and I've seen the manhours that it takes to deal with "donated" 486 computers - hundreds of dollars to get them out of customs, then days and days of hard, nasty, sweaty labor swapping out broken parts, installing an OS from floppies (no CD, no network card, no modem card, no USB...) (and I'd forgotten how friggin sharp the metal edges used to be!), just to get a craptacular computer that doesn't run anything that's been released in the past decade, doesn't interoperate, and looks so frankenstein that no one wants it...
OK, ranting, sorry.
Anyhow. Citizen journalism is good. Witness the speed with which the story about the UCLA cop that tasered a student got around the net thanks to the provocative cell phone video. Remember Rodney King! The problem is... uh, what happened to that UCLA cop, anyhow?
So basically, you're on track in my opinion. Reporting is good, but action is what actually has to happen for things to change. But most development agencies don't like to actually be tied to quantitative hard data anyhow, because the link between development aid and economic improvement requires a lot of twisty analysis and multiple regressions to find anything that's significant.
My favorite was when the MIT Technology Review compared Negroponte (who's received a lot of funding to develop the OLPC and will be selling them in huge batches) to Andrew Carnegie, who used questionable robber-baron business practices to make tons of money, and then funded the building of libraries via grants nationwide, and then set up a maintenance grant provided that the city also contributed funds to the ongoing support of the library.
Anyhow. They're selling machines, at an overall low cost (though there's not much work on the actual implementation part of them yet), without letting people do pilot projects in their own countries before signing on to buy millions of machines through World-Bank debt-financing. Woot.
While I'm on a rant; while I think the OLPC counter-point to Bill's "why can't they just use cell phones?" comment is valid; who want to read a book on a cell phone (Ok, BESIDES me, that's not the point) cell phones are great communication tools, but poor educational tools. Nevertheless, the whole OLPC-will-prevent-genocide is poorly phrased. Citizen journalism will reduce the risk of genocide (I'm not sure I even buy this point, media coverage of Darfur has certainly had mixed, at best, results w/r/t US policy); but OLPC doesn't => citizen journalism any more than cell phone video recording, TelSur style handicams, and so on.
Caveat: I wrote the $970 article.
1) Sure, Nick's been hitting the importance of Internet access a lot of recent, though.
2) I've seen enough plans for cheap Internet for development situations fall apart before or shortly after implementation that this seems reasonable. I think the demand will drive the costs down, but in many cases there are monopoly powers in control of the telecom infrastructure, with no desire or need to "compete" on prices. $135 would be a shock figure, except it's a global average of Internet costs in low-income countries for 40 hours/month of dialup.
3) The training costs are fixed, spread out over the 5-year lifespan, you can amortize that over whatever time period you like.
4) I think 5/100 laptops needing replacement is reasonable, especially as this incorporates laptops stolen and lost, as well as just broken beyond repair. I think the design of the OLPC laptops will actually prove itself incredibly well-done in the field. Normal laptop failure rate in hot and dusty climates is, I'd posit, much closer to 20% or higher if they're not well taken care of. I burnt out a battery and two fans in 2 years in the Caribbean, and I treated my machine pretty nicely. Theft will be a problem, as will acts of nature like ants and floods.
Caveat: I wrote the $970 article
Oh GODS no, M$ would be ten times more expensive, and be proprietary, with closed source and...
right, no. M$ would be a disaster. However, there's rumbling that MS has a few models and is trying to put WinCE or somesuch on them. I for one hope it doesn't work. Having a monoculture of few billion Linux-based boxes is scary enough; can you imagine the zombie army that a billion WinCE boxes would make? *shudder*
Textbooks are a sunk cost, people understand, for the most part, how to use them. They've been a central part of teaching paradigms for hundreds of years. They're also pretty durable. You can drop them, dunk them, and so on, and they never run out of batteries.
Of course, the OLPC crowd has done some impressive work at making their laptops perform up to spec. I doubt they're waterproof, but they're reasonably resilient, dust-resistant, and are self-powered. Fantastic. It's still a huge change in teaching methods to incorporate these into a classroom. Does that mean this shouldn't be done? NO! It means it should be planned a bit, reducing the risk of countries shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to switch to a new and untested technology.
Yes, those laptops were donated to the school, and the project received Negroponte's personal attention. Any project that you spend so much time on, working with the local community, is going to do much better. So, we need a few million clones of Nick, and we'll be fine.