The following GM products have won comparison tests and awards, including some 'car of the year' awards:
And what is that supposed to mean? That whomever did those comparison tests or awarded those "awards" didn't take fuel economy into account, or durability, or any of the factors that make US cars less desirable to the rest of the world.
2007 Saturn Aura midsize sedan. 2008 Chevy Malibu sedan. 2008 Cadillac CTS luxury sport sedan. 2007 Saturn Outlook 8 passenger crossover SUV and its corporate cousins the 2007 GMC Acadia, 2008 Buick Enclave, and 2009 Chevy Traverse. 2008 Saturn Vue small SUV. 2007 Chevy Avalanche pickup. 2007 Chevy Silverado pickup (and GMC Sierra). 2007 Chevy Tahoe and Suburban fullsize SUV (and GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade). 2006 Chevy Corvette. 2008 Pontiac G8 large sedan.
All of those are humongously large cars which only sell in the US. Try those in an European or Asian or even in my hometown (Montevideo, Uruguay, South America). Midsize in Uruguay is "large" (just like the McDonalds meals and many things American).
The Aura, Malibu, CTS, Outlook, Acadia, Enclave, Traverse, and Vue all have 5 star crash ratings across the board from the US government, standard electronic stability control, and Good ratings in the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety front offset and side crash test.
I can believe that, they're probably safe to drive. Still beside the point, an electric vehicle doesn't need to be less safe.
The Aura and Malibu 4-cylinder models offer best-in-class midsize sedan fuel economy among non-hybrid models until the 2010 Fusion goes on sale later this spring. The Outlook and its three cousins offer best-in-class fuel economy for 8 passenger vehicles, with the sole exceptions of the 4-cylinder and hybrid trims of the Toyota Highlander.
You're still talking about HUGE cars. GM -might- have good fuel economy when compared against equally poor american-made vehicles (the Japanese don't drive the Toyotas or Hondas you're talking about, they're designed for the USians).
GM's lineup is far from complete. The 2011 Chevy Cruze, Chevy Volt, and Chevy Spark will be welcome fixes for the gaping weakness in GM's small vehicle offerings.
Chevy Spark sells like hot cakes over here (#1 in sales for its segment in my country). So did Chevrolet Celta (not sure if an equivalent was made for sale in the US, probably not because it's a small car probably designed by the Opel or Vauxhall or some European division),
and Chevrolet Corsa (as I suspected: "this subcompact hatchback is based on the European-market Opel Corsa").
But the made-for-the-North-American-market cars don't sell AT ALL, and the gap in the product line for small, efficient cars is not filled by selling their European division cars (which another poster states, don't sell too well over there either).
Libel and slander cases have always been cost-ineffective, from a claimant's perspective, as long as I have been working in that field, which is almost 35 years.
Thanks for sharing a lawyer's view on this.
You should add an "IAAL" (I AM a lawyer) to your sig:) - of course being a lawyer, it probably would be followed by the standard disclaimer "this is not legal advice, etc...":)
When performing a Google search on my name (first and last in quotes) I can make out at least three different people on the first page. Which one is me? Which one is the chemist? And which one is the guy who died on a passenger ship in the first half of the 1900s? I know the answer, but how would anyone else?
You can't trust Google to provide you the information on an exact person.
My father had the (bad?) idea of naming me after himself (me being the firstborn and it being a family tradition and all that)
So, if you do a search for my name in quotes, you'll find his firm, then my Facebook (yeah, bad idea), then some articles by him, then some articles by me, then some articles by my great-grandfather (!!!), then some stuff by a random Brazilian.
My father's quite upset by that, because my articles (and a Feature Match) are mostly about Magic: The Gathering (the TCG), and he hates the breach of privacy which Facebook represents, while his are all about "serious" stuff.
In my case you can be reasonably certain the Google results are in my family because it mixes a latinized version of a first name with a German surname.
Most employers aren't interested in seeing your code unless you have little experience.
I don't know why that was modded Funny... I've never been asked to show my code on a job interview.
Apparently, being able to work for a locally respected company for 5 years and having all the appropiate certifications was enough. Plus, they had a test period during which they could have fired me with no consequences to them had I not lived up to expectations.
Oh yes there are, especially if you're into the Italian or Spanish style of girl - Uruguay commited genocide on the local natives so everybody is at least 90% descendant from Spanish and Italian inmigrants.
Sadly, nerds/geeks being shunned by the local hot chicks seems to be a worldwide problem:) ...although having money or being foreign probably overcomes that:)
But is 100K enough to retire? . So I think not, unless by "retiring" you mean barely scrounging a living.
Hmm... to give you a perspective: 100k is 8 year's worth of my salary (but I don't have to pay for healthcare and other stuff which is included in my contract, so salary vs US salary isn't exactly fair either).
Say you invested 90k of the 100k on two or three houses for rent, plus one to live in (as my grandparents did), you'd get about U$ 1000 monthly to live in, and 10k as a cushion.
With 1000 dollars monthly, you could afford to eat at decent restaurants every day, Cable TV, Internet, a cheap car (what in the US would be considered a clunker, but mechanics here are almost free compared to there, and you can get cheap spare parts). What you definitely WOULDN'T be able to afford: the latest in tech (forget about the U$ 3000 PC, a U$ 200 PC like the one I'm writing this in works very well for everything but the latest in video editing or heavy gaming or heavy programming), a new car, and travelling to the US or Europe (which most people in the US don't do anyway).
I wouldn't consider that "scrounging by" (even though I can't even afford the clunker card - I'm saving for it), I've been living like this for a long time, and it has a lot of advantages compared to life in the US (almost no commute, very nice beaches only 2 hs travel away, very cheap food including being able to buy the best meat in the world for 10 dollars a kilo)
did your friend also say that the yearly salary
should be a minimum of one million dollars.
with 100k you won't even get a proper house in
places where IT companies exist.
You don't get out much, do you? 100k would buy you a really nice house in my country, about 500 square meters built (about 5000 square feet) with a half-acre to an acre of yard (and we're not talking about one of those plaster and cardboard things you call houses in the US)
And FYI it is quite safe to live here (Montevideo, Uruguay), much safer than the "bad" areas in urban US cities (and yes, I've been there, while I guess you haven't been here). Tech industry here: 5% of GDP was exports of software products and services.
A coworker bought a house (ok, a ruin mostly) for 11k USD last week, and housing prices are expected to fall with the recent crisis. The apartment I rent costs about 20k USD (and rent is 150 USD, that includes running water but not other utilites).
Yep, good point. (except for the part where you say that computer ownership is unusual here - see OLPC).
I definitely won't upgrade to Windows 7 unless I really have to or the price is good enough - most likely as part of a hardware upgrade which would include a dual or quad core as you say.
I'd buy an OEM copy.... or maybe pirate it. I do have a legitimate XP but mostly by chance:)
I'm a programmer, and I have a single-core AMD system at home with 1 Gb of RAM...
I still haven't found any "killer app" for home usage that makes me switch to a dual or quad-core system.
I use it as a media player, it plays any compressed format quite well, surfs the web with a dozen tabs open, I can play most of the games I want to (actually I mostly play Magic Online - yes, that bug ridden thing) since I have an old 6600 Nvidia card.
So, as a home user, why would I want to switch (yes, at work I do have a dual core - no, I don't have a quad core yet, hell I don't have an LCD even)
Developing countries don't give importance to this and at the end of day they don't/can't produce rival products with their own resources, they instead stay addicted to copyrighted products of others.
I think you're selling yourself short there. My country, Uruguay, sells a lot of high-quality software (and its share of crap too, of course:) ), some of which is world-class (the 4GL language/generator Genexus is unmatched in my experience, though still buggy).
Locally-produced software exports account for 3% of our GDP, which is an amazing figure:) .
Back when 286s were bleeding-edge technology, my employer noticed that
locked or gelded software didn't sell.
They sold their product (a competitor to
Lotus 1-2-3) without any locks, and
found that businesses who borrowed copies
then tended to call us us and but copied.
My former employer had a huge success bundling their accounting software with the hardware they sold (Hardware division sold cheap and low margin, Software division raked in the profit).
So many small companies bought support and upgrades from them, I'm amazed they managed to lose money even so (well they did some very boneheaded business decisions, losing tons of money in Brazil and Venezuela).
I don't think 50+% of the people are actually opposed to copyright. They're just opposed to it being used as an excuse for harmful DRM and other complications. They want to see their movies and play their games, and don't mind paying for them if they're any good, but paying lots of money for crap that doesn't work gets tired really fast.
So true. I know an important member of INTA http://www.inta.org/ who would pay any money to see some certain Chinese films... only there's no legal way to get them !!! So he shamefully asked a relative to pirate them.
My uncle has a great DVD player.. but he had to buy a cheap DVD player because his "great" DVD player doesn't show his DVDs so well on his big LCD (I've just read in another post that DVD players don't upconvert some copyrighted DVD's, that most likely the cause).
The IDIOTIC pratice of trying to separate by zone DVD releases to maximize profit and some other political turf wars means VERY EAGER customers turn to pirated versions.
Personally, there is a TON of content I would buy if only people sold it to me !!! (living in Uruguay is hard if you want English or German or Japanese-language stuff).
Well, over here (Uruguay) we're FORCING broadband on families, simply by giving each school-age child an OLPC with internet access..
I don't think it's the best example, but if you don't want to believe a given (3rd world!!) country will soon have 90% broadband penetration, while your own 1st world country doesn't... well, that's your choice.
The growth of cell phones and broadband has been staggering... I browsed for "broadband penetration Uruguay" and I found a 2007 article that was extremely outdated (# of cell phones tripled, and there are like ten times more broadband subscribers than in 2007).
Sorry - this is a little off-topic, but you hit a peeve of mine. I believe you when you say you've never done LSD. I'll even buy that you've never done any drug that's illegal in the country you live in. It's entirely possible that you've never tried alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine (although that would be surprising). But any drug? Really?
I'd recommend aspirin...
There's a group of people in my country that refuse ANY drug/medicine, and resist vaccination of their children.
The State retaliated by not allowing the children to go to classes, and has tried in several occasions to force the children to vaccinate, saying that they're a health risk.
Some (really high-tech) people send their personal videos in it. I've not seen -anything- else use it.
Well, that's an interesting and important legit use. I know of a former coworker (ok, a techie) who saves all his kids' videos in compressed formats (probably this one if he heard of it).
I don't understand why you think DivX won't succeed. For years no-name DVD players have almost all supported DivX, and now even my Pioneer unit is DivX 6 certified. It doesn't seem like a stretch that they will support 7.
My uncle is always extremely annoyed that my grandparents' no name DVD player plays any DVD, while his doesn't play the stuff friends and family buy for him (not all of it legit, but some is, like a wacky conspirational-theory video one of his "friends" gave him).
Unfortunately, local governments usually give huge tax breaks to corps looking to set up shop - so you lose that ability to bank "found" money and foster local industry growth.
Employees still pay local taxes, right? Plus the new savings (hopefully) generated... and I'd rather see private investment than government-fostered local industry growth (which they can still foster the same way - by giving tax breaks)
Books aren't cheap, even when you are just dealing with the printing costs.
Thing is, money goes a long ways with books in the Third World. I'd guess that $100 bucks could buy a 100 books.
Sadly, it is not the case here in Uruguay (South America. Textbooks ARE cheaper than in the US (but not by that much), they're still a HUGE expense for most families, although some are provided by the education system.
And, as an avid reader, I hate it that paperbacks over here sell for almost U$ 20... not because they are expensive, but because of economies of scale / competition, I guess (there are no megabookstores like B&N). One of the things I liked the most in Canada when I went there were the huge bookstores (Indigo and Chapters) with cheap books (even cheaper if you factor in the difference in income). And books over here are NOT taxed (so yes, I do buy from Amazon, but shipping is a huge cost, often way more than the book itself)
All these requirements require compromises that won't sell well in the first world.. and that's always the target audience.
Interesting... so you say that the microscopic Chinese cars I see in the Uruguay streets all the time were targeted for the US? I thought not...
Actually, it will increasingly happen that stuff will NOT be designed with the US in mind at all, as there are some very nice markets in China, India and South America too...
Another poster also mentioned the fact that trickle down economics DID work in this case. I wanted to add that economics is also the reason why ASUS and the other for-profit companies making Netbooks succeeded in displacing OLPC (once it was shown that there WAS a market)
That was another big problem, they didn't have a clear set of examples of what it was actually FOR. As it was though, it was a glorified netbook.
My country (Uruguay) was the one that invested the heaviest in OLPC (all the school-age kids are getting it), and the main problem is not the computers themselves, or Sugar OS or whatever... it is that there wasn't a plan in place to actually use them for something worthwile (textbooks, etc..).
a 1024 x 768 display, while it would strike a power user as torture, is definitely not mocking to the user.
Well, it seems you guys are pampered... I develop on a 15' CRT with 1024 x 768 (writing on it right now)... I assure you, it is NOT a torture... I still remember the B&W and CGA days.
Still, these days a decent LCD isn't much more than my monthly wage (I'm in Uruguay), so they could afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
The following GM products have won comparison tests and awards, including some 'car of the year' awards:
And what is that supposed to mean? That whomever did those comparison tests or awarded those "awards" didn't take fuel economy into account, or durability, or any of the factors that make US cars less desirable to the rest of the world.
2007 Saturn Aura midsize sedan. 2008 Chevy Malibu sedan. 2008 Cadillac CTS luxury sport sedan. 2007 Saturn Outlook 8 passenger crossover SUV and its corporate cousins the 2007 GMC Acadia, 2008 Buick Enclave, and 2009 Chevy Traverse. 2008 Saturn Vue small SUV. 2007 Chevy Avalanche pickup. 2007 Chevy Silverado pickup (and GMC Sierra). 2007 Chevy Tahoe and Suburban fullsize SUV (and GMC Yukon and Cadillac Escalade). 2006 Chevy Corvette. 2008 Pontiac G8 large sedan.
All of those are humongously large cars which only sell in the US. Try those in an European or Asian or even in my hometown (Montevideo, Uruguay, South America). Midsize in Uruguay is "large" (just like the McDonalds meals and many things American).
The Aura, Malibu, CTS, Outlook, Acadia, Enclave, Traverse, and Vue all have 5 star crash ratings across the board from the US government, standard electronic stability control, and Good ratings in the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety front offset and side crash test.
I can believe that, they're probably safe to drive. Still beside the point, an electric vehicle doesn't need to be less safe.
The Aura and Malibu 4-cylinder models offer best-in-class midsize sedan fuel economy among non-hybrid models until the 2010 Fusion goes on sale later this spring. The Outlook and its three cousins offer best-in-class fuel economy for 8 passenger vehicles, with the sole exceptions of the 4-cylinder and hybrid trims of the Toyota Highlander.
You're still talking about HUGE cars. GM -might- have good fuel economy when compared against equally poor american-made vehicles (the Japanese don't drive the Toyotas or Hondas you're talking about, they're designed for the USians).
GM's lineup is far from complete. The 2011 Chevy Cruze, Chevy Volt, and Chevy Spark will be welcome fixes for the gaping weakness in GM's small vehicle offerings.
Chevy Spark sells like hot cakes over here (#1 in sales for its segment in my country).
So did Chevrolet Celta (not sure if an equivalent was made for sale in the US, probably not because it's a small car probably designed by the Opel or Vauxhall or some European division), and Chevrolet Corsa (as I suspected: "this subcompact hatchback is based on the European-market Opel Corsa").
But the made-for-the-North-American-market cars don't sell AT ALL, and the gap in the product line for small, efficient cars is not filled by selling their European division cars (which another poster states, don't sell too well over there either).
Libel and slander cases have always been cost-ineffective, from a claimant's perspective, as long as I have been working in that field, which is almost 35 years.
Thanks for sharing a lawyer's view on this.
:) - of course being a lawyer, it probably would be followed by the standard disclaimer "this is not legal advice, etc..." :)
You should add an "IAAL" (I AM a lawyer) to your sig
When performing a Google search on my name (first and last in quotes) I can make out at least three different people on the first page. Which one is me? Which one is the chemist? And which one is the guy who died on a passenger ship in the first half of the 1900s? I know the answer, but how would anyone else?
You can't trust Google to provide you the information on an exact person.
My father had the (bad?) idea of naming me after himself (me being the firstborn and it being a family tradition and all that)
So, if you do a search for my name in quotes, you'll find his firm, then my Facebook (yeah, bad idea), then some articles by him, then some articles by me, then some articles by my great-grandfather (!!!), then some stuff by a random Brazilian.
My father's quite upset by that, because my articles (and a Feature Match) are mostly about Magic: The Gathering (the TCG), and he hates the breach of privacy which Facebook represents, while his are all about "serious" stuff.
In my case you can be reasonably certain the Google results are in my family because it mixes a latinized version of a first name with a German surname.
Most employers aren't interested in seeing your code unless you have little experience.
I don't know why that was modded Funny... I've never been asked to show my code on a job interview.
Apparently, being able to work for a locally respected company for 5 years and having all the appropiate certifications was enough. Plus, they had a test period during which they could have fired me with no consequences to them had I not lived up to expectations.
As far as users are concerned, the helpdesk is a database frontend.
Lol, great quote, I might want to sig that :)
What's this, the "Cat ate my homework" defense?
My school teachers didn't accept that one, and I'd bet the judge won't, either...
Still, pretty funny.
Oh yes there are, especially if you're into the Italian or Spanish style of girl - Uruguay commited genocide on the local natives so everybody is at least 90% descendant from Spanish and Italian inmigrants.
:) :)
Sadly, nerds/geeks being shunned by the local hot chicks seems to be a worldwide problem
...although having money or being foreign probably overcomes that
But is 100K enough to retire? . So I think not, unless by "retiring" you mean barely scrounging a living.
Hmm... to give you a perspective: 100k is 8 year's worth of my salary (but I don't have to pay for healthcare and other stuff which is included in my contract, so salary vs US salary isn't exactly fair either).
Say you invested 90k of the 100k on two or three houses for rent, plus one to live in (as my grandparents did), you'd get about U$ 1000 monthly to live in, and 10k as a cushion.
With 1000 dollars monthly, you could afford to eat at decent restaurants every day, Cable TV, Internet, a cheap car (what in the US would be considered a clunker, but mechanics here are almost free compared to there, and you can get cheap spare parts). What you definitely WOULDN'T be able to afford: the latest in tech (forget about the U$ 3000 PC, a U$ 200 PC like the one I'm writing this in works very well for everything but the latest in video editing or heavy gaming or heavy programming), a new car, and travelling to the US or Europe (which most people in the US don't do anyway).
I wouldn't consider that "scrounging by" (even though I can't even afford the clunker card - I'm saving for it), I've been living like this for a long time, and it has a lot of advantages compared to life in the US (almost no commute, very nice beaches only 2 hs travel away, very cheap food including being able to buy the best meat in the world for 10 dollars a kilo)
did your friend also say that the yearly salary
should be a minimum of one million dollars.
with 100k you won't even get a proper house in
places where IT companies exist.
You don't get out much, do you? 100k would buy you a really nice house in my country, about 500 square meters built (about 5000 square feet) with a half-acre to an acre of yard (and we're not talking about one of those plaster and cardboard things you call houses in the US)
And FYI it is quite safe to live here (Montevideo, Uruguay), much safer than the "bad" areas in urban US cities (and yes, I've been there, while I guess you haven't been here). Tech industry here: 5% of GDP was exports of software products and services.
A quick check shows that 100k would buy you a decent house in the US even: http://realestate.shop.ebay.com/
However, I am impressed at the number of rooms an average American house is supposed to have:
http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Americas/United-States-HOUSING.html
A coworker bought a house (ok, a ruin mostly) for 11k USD last week, and housing prices are expected to fall with the recent crisis. The apartment I rent costs about 20k USD (and rent is 150 USD, that includes running water but not other utilites).
Yep, good point. (except for the part where you say that computer ownership is unusual here - see OLPC).
:)
I definitely won't upgrade to Windows 7 unless I really have to or the price is good enough - most likely as part of a hardware upgrade which would include a dual or quad core as you say.
I'd buy an OEM copy.... or maybe pirate it. I do have a legitimate XP but mostly by chance
I'm a programmer, and I have a single-core AMD system at home with 1 Gb of RAM...
I still haven't found any "killer app" for home usage that makes me switch to a dual or quad-core system.
I use it as a media player, it plays any compressed format quite well, surfs the web with a dozen tabs open, I can play most of the games I want to (actually I mostly play Magic Online - yes, that bug ridden thing) since I have an old 6600 Nvidia card.
So, as a home user, why would I want to switch (yes, at work I do have a dual core - no, I don't have a quad core yet, hell I don't have an LCD even)
Developing countries don't give importance to this and at the end of day they don't/can't produce rival products with their own resources, they instead stay addicted to copyrighted products of others.
I think you're selling yourself short there. My country, Uruguay, sells a lot of high-quality software (and its share of crap too, of course :) ), some of which is world-class (the 4GL language/generator Genexus is unmatched in my experience, though still buggy).
:) .
Locally-produced software exports account for 3% of our GDP, which is an amazing figure
Back when 286s were bleeding-edge technology, my employer noticed that locked or gelded software didn't sell. They sold their product (a competitor to Lotus 1-2-3) without any locks, and found that businesses who borrowed copies then tended to call us us and but copied.
My former employer had a huge success bundling their accounting software with the hardware they sold (Hardware division sold cheap and low margin, Software division raked in the profit).
So many small companies bought support and upgrades from them, I'm amazed they managed to lose money even so (well they did some very boneheaded business decisions, losing tons of money in Brazil and Venezuela).
I don't think 50+% of the people are actually opposed to copyright. They're just opposed to it being used as an excuse for harmful DRM and other complications. They want to see their movies and play their games, and don't mind paying for them if they're any good, but paying lots of money for crap that doesn't work gets tired really fast.
So true. I know an important member of INTA http://www.inta.org/ who would pay any money to see some certain Chinese films... only there's no legal way to get them !!! So he shamefully asked a relative to pirate them.
My uncle has a great DVD player.. but he had to buy a cheap DVD player because his "great" DVD player doesn't show his DVDs so well on his big LCD (I've just read in another post that DVD players don't upconvert some copyrighted DVD's, that most likely the cause).
The IDIOTIC pratice of trying to separate by zone DVD releases to maximize profit and some other political turf wars means VERY EAGER customers turn to pirated versions.
Personally, there is a TON of content I would buy if only people sold it to me !!! (living in Uruguay is hard if you want English or German or Japanese-language stuff).
Well, over here (Uruguay) we're FORCING broadband on families, simply by giving each school-age child an OLPC with internet access..
I don't think it's the best example, but if you don't want to believe a given (3rd world!!) country will soon have 90% broadband penetration, while your own 1st world country doesn't... well, that's your choice.
The growth of cell phones and broadband has been staggering... I browsed for "broadband penetration Uruguay" and I found a 2007 article that was extremely outdated (# of cell phones tripled, and there are like ten times more broadband subscribers than in 2007).
How is government making a decision for people?
As usual, by spending other people's money.
Sorry - this is a little off-topic, but you hit a peeve of mine. I believe you when you say you've never done LSD. I'll even buy that you've never done any drug that's illegal in the country you live in. It's entirely possible that you've never tried alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine (although that would be surprising). But any drug? Really?
I'd recommend aspirin ...
There's a group of people in my country that refuse ANY drug/medicine, and resist vaccination of their children.
The State retaliated by not allowing the children to go to classes, and has tried in several occasions to force the children to vaccinate, saying that they're a health risk.
Some (really high-tech) people send their personal videos in it. I've not seen -anything- else use it.
Well, that's an interesting and important legit use. I know of a former coworker (ok, a techie) who saves all his kids' videos in compressed formats (probably this one if he heard of it).
I don't understand why you think DivX won't succeed. For years no-name DVD players have almost all supported DivX, and now even my Pioneer unit is DivX 6 certified. It doesn't seem like a stretch that they will support 7.
My uncle is always extremely annoyed that my grandparents' no name DVD player plays any DVD, while his doesn't play the stuff friends and family buy for him (not all of it legit, but some is, like a wacky conspirational-theory video one of his "friends" gave him).
Unfortunately, local governments usually give huge tax breaks to corps looking to set up shop - so you lose that ability to bank "found" money and foster local industry growth.
Employees still pay local taxes, right? Plus the new savings (hopefully) generated... and I'd rather see private investment than government-fostered local industry growth (which they can still foster the same way - by giving tax breaks)
Im currently typing this on 2x 1920x1200.
Ahhh... the envy :P (I wish I could :)
Books aren't cheap, even when you are just dealing with the printing costs.
Thing is, money goes a long ways with books in the Third World. I'd guess that $100 bucks could buy a 100 books.
Sadly, it is not the case here in Uruguay (South America. Textbooks ARE cheaper than in the US (but not by that much), they're still a HUGE expense for most families, although some are provided by the education system.
And, as an avid reader, I hate it that paperbacks over here sell for almost U$ 20... not because they are expensive, but because of economies of scale / competition, I guess (there are no megabookstores like B&N). One of the things I liked the most in Canada when I went there were the huge bookstores (Indigo and Chapters) with cheap books (even cheaper if you factor in the difference in income). And books over here are NOT taxed (so yes, I do buy from Amazon, but shipping is a huge cost, often way more than the book itself)
All these requirements require compromises that won't sell well in the first world.. and that's always the target audience.
Interesting... so you say that the microscopic Chinese cars I see in the Uruguay streets all the time were targeted for the US? I thought not...
Actually, it will increasingly happen that stuff will NOT be designed with the US in mind at all, as there are some very nice markets in China, India and South America too...
Another poster also mentioned the fact that trickle down economics DID work in this case. I wanted to add that economics is also the reason why ASUS and the other for-profit companies making Netbooks succeeded in displacing OLPC (once it was shown that there WAS a market)
That was another big problem, they didn't have a clear set of examples of what it was actually FOR. As it was though, it was a glorified netbook.
My country (Uruguay) was the one that invested the heaviest in OLPC (all the school-age kids are getting it), and the main problem is not the computers themselves, or Sugar OS or whatever... it is that there wasn't a plan in place to actually use them for something worthwile (textbooks, etc..).
Teachers are NOT happy about that.
a 1024 x 768 display, while it would strike a power user as torture, is definitely not mocking to the user.
Well, it seems you guys are pampered... I develop on a 15' CRT with 1024 x 768 (writing on it right now)... I assure you, it is NOT a torture... I still remember the B&W and CGA days.
Still, these days a decent LCD isn't much more than my monthly wage (I'm in Uruguay), so they could afford it.