Read the article carefully. The $108 is extracted from OLPC's memorandum with Libya, and it covers things like setting up satellite dishes in communities, extending the mesh network using repeaters, and configuring a central server that syncs during low-bandwidth-utilization times with resources like Wikipedia and such. It's a lot of valuable work, especially the satellite dish.
I think these things are great. I am always, always in favor of getting more people access to more information. Global literacy and education will make things a lot harder for the governments, and therein a lot better for all of us citizen types. I even think that the OLPC laptop could make cell phones look like a speedbump on the road to development.
Here's the big bump. Read up on Yunus' organization. It has a fantastic model for development, reflected by his Nobel Prize. They give micro-loans to interested people in a community that has little or no technology, train them in the cell phone, and let them go to town. The person has to come and ask for this process. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes others in the community begin taking out loans for cell phones too, setting up competition.
This is very, very different from the government paying for a few million laptops, distributing them to schools in a huge push, and hoping that the social returns on their fiscal investment will make it worth the extra debt burden they just took on. Remember, some of these countries are already up to their eyeballs in debt repayment, with up to 80 cents on every tax dollar going towards debt fees.
Are there good ways to have the OLPC laptops get out there? Yes. Hells yes, and I hope that OLPC will start thinking about this instead of hand-waving about it.
OK, this is silly. The point is that the cost of implementation for these laptops is a lot more than $100. Fine. The fine article concludes:
"Of course, a more expensive computer system would just drive all of this upwards, so at least we're starting cheap. This all reminds me of Namibia's SchoolNet rejecting Microsoft's "gift" of MS Office (sans operating system!). For the OLPC project to succeed, it needs to accept that it's selling a $100 laptop with an $872 support plan, and find countries that can afford it as such."
The real travesty of the project is the resistance to pilot projects. Great, this is a fantastic laptop - incredibly well thought out design, incredible hardware price. Selling a few million laptops to a country's education ministry will be an outright failure, ending up with the government even deeper in debt. Rolling them out a bit more slowly, allowing for organic processes of diffusion to work, and best practices in-country to emerge, is a much better deal.
I am one of those "fucked up in the head" people that realizes that there is a real person at the other end of every post....what are you doing on/.???
Hopefully you wont get trollified, you're totally right. And in the time it took my to cut and paste, 10 others had done the same because the article summary made it look all oh, poor little spyware company getting hoisted by its own anti-spyware petard, when the reality was much different. le sigh.
The irony of going after a spyware vendor ends once you discover that they're spamming lying scum:
"...their "Spyware Cleaner" product had, well, a couple of flaws: it didn't work well, it deleted a user's Hosts file after installation, and it tried to convince users to "upgrade" to another program that did essentially the same thing.
But it was the way that Spyware Cleaner was marketed that attracted the Attorney General's attention in the first place. The company allegedly spammed users to advertise its product, included deceptive subject lines, failed to include an opt-out mechanism, and suggested that the product was "discounted" for a "limited time," when in reality it was always available for the same price.
The dubious marketing tactics did not end there. Secure Computer also sold its product using pop-up ads which warned users that their computers might be infected with spyware, and it offered them a free system scan. The results of the scan were invariably positive. "Our investigation found that this so-called free scan always detected spyware, even on a clean computer," said Senior Counsel Paula Selis, who led the state investigation. "In order to remove this falsely detected spyware, users were instructed to pay $49.95 for the full version of Spyware Cleaner." It is illegal under Washington law to "induce a computer user to download software by falsely claiming the software is necessary for security purposes," she added.
Could Google get top advertising on Yahoo? MSN Search? I'm sure everyone does it. Web search is probably a hard oligopoly.
Also, even if it becomes more monopolistic, the cost of switching for users to a new upstart is zero. Sure, this new search engine won't be able to advertise in Google's AdWords (at the top spot), but they can put out print ads, tv spots, hell, they could even buy a super bowl ad where all the employees sing off key if they want to.
The problem with MSFT is not as much the monopoly they hold, but the switching cost/lock in effect that prevents new entrants from doing well. Tried to buy a "headless" PC from any of the big, reliable names recently? It's *still* really difficult.
I'm sure they can get Windows to fit on the flash drive, even XP - If I can run it from a BartPE CD, I can get it on a 512MB drive. Now, MS Office and so on... well, ok, maybe not.
But this is hardly the real problem. OLPCs have only 128M of RAM. Have you tried running XP with that little? It hurts. 2k or 98SE (still, I posit, one of the best MS OSes ever, accepting that the competition ain't grand) might work.
WinCE of course is probably the real valid option here; so we're all just being, well, Slashdot nitpickers.
That all being said, I have enough security/paranoia concerns about a billion of any computing monoculture deployed worldwide to a new population with satellite Internet access, when we're talking about Linux boxes with additional network security features. A billion Windows boxes?... I can see the headlines now: In 2006, 9/10 emails were spam. After 1 billion identical WinCE OLPC laptops got rooted worldwide, simultaneously, the tubes are no longer processing any email, as it has been determined that there is not a statistically significant amount of non-spam email in the system.
I've been nodding my head to almost every contradictory post so far, and that means there's something more here. I think it's obvious that you can have a good manager who's clueless at tech, or a horrible manager who stays afterhours to rebuild his kernel. I'll take a manager who matches my in brains with whom I can establish a mutually-trusting relationship, regardless of their area of expertise, any day. I should be able to explain my problems and such to someone that smart, and our trust and relationship should let us both fudge a bit on whatever side we feel needs to be fudged, with tacit and/or even explicit knowledge of the other. Most importantly, I want an advocate who can and will go to bat for me at the managerial/executive/funding agency levels. Now, it's nice if I don't have to show them how to do column-sums in Excel, but not necessary.
Obviously, I'll never move to Vista, and I'll never allow my organization to move to Vista. It's time for me to move on anyhow, so if there's some organizational/executive push to move, I'll take the opportunity to upgrade myself right out the door.
That said, the first time BigExec or Mr.Senator gets his product accidentally deactivated, well, it probably actually won't change anything, but it'll make headlines and hopefully reduce the number of people moving to Vista. I wonder how long Dell will allow people to choose XP instead of Vista as an OS on new computers?
First, the mindshare they're worried about is not the developers', but the funding/loaning agencies and development agencies. But regardless, this is an old and tired criticism that's overshadowing more important ones involving the price tag. Most importantly, this is a technology that's never been field-tested for it's technological capability nor in pilot projects investigating its success, yet they are asking countries to go deeply into debt to purchase millions (minimum order is one million) of these to deploy in their countries. It's not that it's a bad design, it's not that it's money that could go elsewhere; it's a failure of project planning and testing at an enormous scale.
I mostly agree, but many indigenous communities don't recognize land rights with a Western mentality; communal lands with no private ownership, for example. This is not due to a lack of understanding of private lands, which is why they lobby their government for land rights, but a cultural choice.
Or, and I know this may be a bit revolutionary, how about a database abstraction layer and support for anything that speaks SQL, brought forward to the user/administrator interface? I imagine most projects are using libraries that support this anyhow...
I know this; it is indeed exactly why I chose the measurements I did, because I know the data already exists; it needs to be on the main page and visible, as even us geeks don't always take the time to peek at the history, discussion, pages, or the listed references; a quick tip-off to suggest that we should take more care with an article might be handy.
I think a valuable addition to the mediawiki software would be a few "activity meters" available on every page graphically illustrating some index of # of independent, logged-in authors involved in editing/revising an entry, actual revision activity including deletion of phrases, discussion page activity, and so on as an indicator of at least some attempt at NPOV through different viewpoints, etc.
Obviously, it's game-able through multiple accounts, etc. (maybe add in an over-time variable to make it more difficult?), but it could reveal cases like this where it's a single person expousing their theory/viewpoint.
To be fair, Ron Paul votes against everything. He's really a libertarian in Republican clothing, which is fine, we need more of them to balance out the neocon and religious right types.
Slashdot Mirror
Caveat: I am the author of said $970 article.
Read the article carefully. The $108 is extracted from OLPC's memorandum with Libya, and it covers things like setting up satellite dishes in communities, extending the mesh network using repeaters, and configuring a central server that syncs during low-bandwidth-utilization times with resources like Wikipedia and such. It's a lot of valuable work, especially the satellite dish.
I think these things are great. I am always, always in favor of getting more people access to more information. Global literacy and education will make things a lot harder for the governments, and therein a lot better for all of us citizen types. I even think that the OLPC laptop could make cell phones look like a speedbump on the road to development.
Here's the big bump. Read up on Yunus' organization. It has a fantastic model for development, reflected by his Nobel Prize. They give micro-loans to interested people in a community that has little or no technology, train them in the cell phone, and let them go to town. The person has to come and ask for this process. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes others in the community begin taking out loans for cell phones too, setting up competition.
This is very, very different from the government paying for a few million laptops, distributing them to schools in a huge push, and hoping that the social returns on their fiscal investment will make it worth the extra debt burden they just took on. Remember, some of these countries are already up to their eyeballs in debt repayment, with up to 80 cents on every tax dollar going towards debt fees.
Are there good ways to have the OLPC laptops get out there? Yes. Hells yes, and I hope that OLPC will start thinking about this instead of hand-waving about it.
OK, this is silly. The point is that the cost of implementation for these laptops is a lot more than $100. Fine. The fine article concludes:
"Of course, a more expensive computer system would just drive all of this upwards, so at least we're starting cheap. This all reminds me of Namibia's SchoolNet rejecting Microsoft's "gift" of MS Office (sans operating system!). For the OLPC project to succeed, it needs to accept that it's selling a $100 laptop with an $872 support plan, and find countries that can afford it as such."
The real travesty of the project is the resistance to pilot projects. Great, this is a fantastic laptop - incredibly well thought out design, incredible hardware price. Selling a few million laptops to a country's education ministry will be an outright failure, ending up with the government even deeper in debt. Rolling them out a bit more slowly, allowing for organic processes of diffusion to work, and best practices in-country to emerge, is a much better deal.
If you look further, that's based on a UN study on actual costs of Internet access in low-development countries.
The popping sound you heard after parent post was made were hundreds of small brains at TSA HQ.
I am one of those "fucked up in the head" people that realizes that there is a real person at the other end of every post. ...what are you doing on /.???
Hopefully you wont get trollified, you're totally right. And in the time it took my to cut and paste, 10 others had done the same because the article summary made it look all oh, poor little spyware company getting hoisted by its own anti-spyware petard, when the reality was much different. le sigh.
The irony of going after a spyware vendor ends once you discover that they're spamming lying scum:
"...their "Spyware Cleaner" product had, well, a couple of flaws: it didn't work well, it deleted a user's Hosts file after installation, and it tried to convince users to "upgrade" to another program that did essentially the same thing.
But it was the way that Spyware Cleaner was marketed that attracted the Attorney General's attention in the first place. The company allegedly spammed users to advertise its product, included deceptive subject lines, failed to include an opt-out mechanism, and suggested that the product was "discounted" for a "limited time," when in reality it was always available for the same price.
The dubious marketing tactics did not end there. Secure Computer also sold its product using pop-up ads which warned users that their computers might be infected with spyware, and it offered them a free system scan. The results of the scan were invariably positive. "Our investigation found that this so-called free scan always detected spyware, even on a clean computer," said Senior Counsel Paula Selis, who led the state investigation. "In order to remove this falsely detected spyware, users were instructed to pay $49.95 for the full version of Spyware Cleaner." It is illegal under Washington law to "induce a computer user to download software by falsely claiming the software is necessary for security purposes," she added.
Could Google get top advertising on Yahoo? MSN Search? I'm sure everyone does it. Web search is probably a hard oligopoly.
Also, even if it becomes more monopolistic, the cost of switching for users to a new upstart is zero. Sure, this new search engine won't be able to advertise in Google's AdWords (at the top spot), but they can put out print ads, tv spots, hell, they could even buy a super bowl ad where all the employees sing off key if they want to.
The problem with MSFT is not as much the monopoly they hold, but the switching cost/lock in effect that prevents new entrants from doing well. Tried to buy a "headless" PC from any of the big, reliable names recently? It's *still* really difficult.
Does this device go "ding" when its done?
If so, then the US Government is infringing on U.K. patents owned by my client, a Mr. Monty Python, on a machine that goes "Ping!"
I'm sure they can get Windows to fit on the flash drive, even XP - If I can run it from a BartPE CD, I can get it on a 512MB drive. Now, MS Office and so on... well, ok, maybe not.
... I can see the headlines now: In 2006, 9/10 emails were spam. After 1 billion identical WinCE OLPC laptops got rooted worldwide, simultaneously, the tubes are no longer processing any email, as it has been determined that there is not a statistically significant amount of non-spam email in the system.
But this is hardly the real problem. OLPCs have only 128M of RAM. Have you tried running XP with that little? It hurts. 2k or 98SE (still, I posit, one of the best MS OSes ever, accepting that the competition ain't grand) might work.
WinCE of course is probably the real valid option here; so we're all just being, well, Slashdot nitpickers.
That all being said, I have enough security/paranoia concerns about a billion of any computing monoculture deployed worldwide to a new population with satellite Internet access, when we're talking about Linux boxes with additional network security features. A billion Windows boxes?
Technically speaking, AIDS is "revenge" on those getting it during the early 80s, but who's keeping score?
The neocon crowd didn't get any during the 60s; this is their revenge on those who did.
I've been nodding my head to almost every contradictory post so far, and that means there's something more here. I think it's obvious that you can have a good manager who's clueless at tech, or a horrible manager who stays afterhours to rebuild his kernel. I'll take a manager who matches my in brains with whom I can establish a mutually-trusting relationship, regardless of their area of expertise, any day. I should be able to explain my problems and such to someone that smart, and our trust and relationship should let us both fudge a bit on whatever side we feel needs to be fudged, with tacit and/or even explicit knowledge of the other. Most importantly, I want an advocate who can and will go to bat for me at the managerial/executive/funding agency levels. Now, it's nice if I don't have to show them how to do column-sums in Excel, but not necessary.
Obviously, I'll never move to Vista, and I'll never allow my organization to move to Vista. It's time for me to move on anyhow, so if there's some organizational/executive push to move, I'll take the opportunity to upgrade myself right out the door.
That said, the first time BigExec or Mr.Senator gets his product accidentally deactivated, well, it probably actually won't change anything, but it'll make headlines and hopefully reduce the number of people moving to Vista. I wonder how long Dell will allow people to choose XP instead of Vista as an OS on new computers?
"Windows Vista is out! Time to upgrade to Linux!
First, the mindshare they're worried about is not the developers', but the funding/loaning agencies and development agencies. But regardless, this is an old and tired criticism that's overshadowing more important ones involving the price tag. Most importantly, this is a technology that's never been field-tested for it's technological capability nor in pilot projects investigating its success, yet they are asking countries to go deeply into debt to purchase millions (minimum order is one million) of these to deploy in their countries. It's not that it's a bad design, it's not that it's money that could go elsewhere; it's a failure of project planning and testing at an enormous scale.
exactly; does this study control for people who are idiots?
I mostly agree, but many indigenous communities don't recognize land rights with a Western mentality; communal lands with no private ownership, for example. This is not due to a lack of understanding of private lands, which is why they lobby their government for land rights, but a cultural choice.
It can still work, just not as simply.
Or, and I know this may be a bit revolutionary, how about a database abstraction layer and support for anything that speaks SQL, brought forward to the user/administrator interface? I imagine most projects are using libraries that support this anyhow...
It re-opens the classic debate about the total cost of ownership
sczimme said: I must have missed something: when was this debate closed?
Oh man, you did NOT miss that thread!!! we resolved the TCO debate, Mac v Linux, Security models, and even Emacs vs Vi.
Also, and this is true for brains if few other things, it's not the size that matters, it's the complexity of the folds!
DISCLAIMER: This DOES NOT WORK as a pickup line.
This just opens up a whole new class of "otherkin" waiting to claim their neanderthal incarnations.
I know this; it is indeed exactly why I chose the measurements I did, because I know the data already exists; it needs to be on the main page and visible, as even us geeks don't always take the time to peek at the history, discussion, pages, or the listed references; a quick tip-off to suggest that we should take more care with an article might be handy.
Or "Operation Phishers of Phishers of Men"
I think a valuable addition to the mediawiki software would be a few "activity meters" available on every page graphically illustrating some index of # of independent, logged-in authors involved in editing/revising an entry, actual revision activity including deletion of phrases, discussion page activity, and so on as an indicator of at least some attempt at NPOV through different viewpoints, etc.
Obviously, it's game-able through multiple accounts, etc. (maybe add in an over-time variable to make it more difficult?), but it could reveal cases like this where it's a single person expousing their theory/viewpoint.
To be fair, Ron Paul votes against everything. He's really a libertarian in Republican clothing, which is fine, we need more of them to balance out the neocon and religious right types.