Computers To Every Kid In 3rd World Countries

[Homicidalheathen]

Arguments on both sides......

Armed with an Intel government presentation critical of the One Laptop Per Child box, OLTC dream spinner Nicholas Negroponte accused Intel on "60 Minutes" of dumping ~$200 Classmate PC laptops on the third-world markets where he's trying to sell his $176 AMD-based widgets - currently in minimum quantities of 250,000.

Chalking it up to the Intel-AMD feud, he said Intel was hurting his "mission enormously" and called it "shameless." He needs three million pre-paid orders for Quanta to start volume production.

Intel's unabashed chairman Craig Barrett, speaking of the Intel marketing document, said, "That's just the way our business works." Intel isn't "trying to drive him out of business. We've trying to bring capability to young people." And according to Barrett, "There are lots of opportunities for us to work together."

Meanwhile, in the states, some schools have started taking laptops away from children as distractions from real education.

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The world-changing hundred-dollar laptop is going into mass production, which means that soon one of two things will happen. Either a) a huge number of these things will get shipped into developing countries and begin to crash and pile up, broken, in heaps; or b) a huge number of these things will pile up in some warehouse because the orders still aren’t coming in. Now the good folks at OLPC are saying they will subsidize their efforts by selling these craptops to First-World freetards for something like five hundred bucks a piece. See the Engadget piece here.

Why is this significant? It’s significant because it’s a huge about-face for OLPC, which originally said they wouldn’t sell to consumers here because there was going to be such demand in the Third World and they wanted to make sure that every kid got a machine before they started letting folks here have them. Now they’re going to start cranking them out and selling them here while they wait for those huge million-unit orders to come in from the developing world — you know, those orders that will cost each country $100 million that they don’t, um, have. Ahem.

The next fall-back, as these machines start piling up, will be for OLPC to try to arrange “financing” through the World Bank or the U.N. or some other organization. When that falls through they can blame those guys. Or they’ll blame Intel, which by then will have swept in and helped these countries set up their own plants to build the machines locally, thereby creating jobs. I know it sounds strange, but what Intel understands (and OLPC doesn’t) is that these countries don’t want expensive handouts. They want companies to come in and create jobs and help them build an ecosystem. Just selling them a bunch of cheap laptops (which by the way are still too expensive for them) doesn’t do them much good.

Of course the OLPC people won’t admit defeat or even admit to being disappointed. And they’ll never admit how stupid and idealistic and naive they look. And nobody in the freetarded media will ever criticize them because then they too will look stupid for having touted this thing like it was the second coming of You-Know-Who.

Note to Nicholas Negroponte: You went on your big world tour and met with Kofi Annan and all these government ministers and they all posed for photos and told you how wonderful your plans were and how they were so eager to get started. But then when it came time to write checks they all kind of stopped returning your phone calls…

The hundred dollar laptop debacle grows from the same technocratic do-gooder wellspring as the perennial let’s-help-the-homeless-by-reimagining-the-shopping-cart idea that springs up every 12.4 milliseconds in a college campus architecture or design class (the first time I encountered this, it was a friend at Cornell who had designed a urban water storage tower with showers that let the homeless clean up, with integrated lockable mini-garages that let them secure their stolen shopping carts while shedding their layers of sweat, dust, crumbs of fast food, and layer of accreted bottle caps and cigarette butts).

The two problems in all of these schemes is:

(a) assuming that technology can fix problems that are caused by human nature or economics

(b) assuming that a bunch of academics in their ivory towers can figure out what a bunch of people hundreds or thousands of miles away want, without focus group testing, demo product launches, or anything else.

I’m in the process of launching something absolutely trivial (in the grand scheme of things): an online comic book store. This has been done 200 times before. I’m going to do it about 10% better.

…and for this, I’ve asked people what they actually want, what they’re willing to pay for, what their related interests are, etc.

…and I’m betting my own house on my ability to deliver something that people feel is of value.

One mistake that a lot of leftists make when they criticize libertarianism or the free market is assuming that the supporters of each are entirely motivated by the love of money.

In fact, there is a second reason to embrace the market (entirely inseparable, in practice, from the first):

It’s because Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Or, to make an electrical engineering argument: parallel processing, the pagerank algorithm, emergent decision making, the wisdom of the crowd, distributed sensor nets…all these things work a hell of a lot better than a mainframe in an air-conditioned room with a few punch card readers hooked up in a closed loop with the punch card puncher.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 8:36 am and is filed under

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Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas is founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association. He is currently on leave from MIT, where he was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology. A graduate of MIT, Nicholas was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. Conceived in 1980, the Media Laboratory opened its doors in 1985. He is also author of the 1995 best seller, Being Digital, which has been translated into more than 40 languages. In the private sector, Nicholas serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc. and as general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies, including Wired magazine.

WIRED Columns (1993-1998)

Collaborators

MIT Media Lab

OLPC

Publicity Photo (300dpi JPG): Download

Credit: Mike McGregor

http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/

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http://www.media.mit.edu/people/bio_nicholas.html

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This PC wants to save the world

Nicholas Negroponte's much-hyped $100 laptop is going into production, but skeptics, including Intel, see weaknesses in his plan.

By David Kirkpatrick, Fortune senior editor

October 24 2006: 6:23 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- "Nicholas, it looks like a science project," Apple (Charts) CEO Steve Jobs said to Nicholas Negroponte, the Pied Piper of the $100 laptop, as he demonstrated one of its first versions. Skeptics abounded when, in early 2005, Negroponte left MIT's Media Lab, which he founded and ran for 20 years, aiming to build a supercheap portable computer for the world's poor children.

His first designs were lackluster, as Jobs pointed out. For months Negroponte toted around a mockup whose screen folded out like a tent so a tiny lamp could project an image.

The energy-friendly XO

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But today Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is preparing to launch its dream machine. In early November, 5,000 test units are slated to start rolling off state-of-the-art production lines owned by OLPC partner Quanta Computer (Charts) of Taiwan, the world's largest maker of laptops.

Muammar Qaddafi plans to give one to every schoolchild in Libya. Shimon Peres hopes to do something similar for Palestinian kids in the West Bank.

Negroponte has also seduced the leaders of Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and - until the recent coup - Thailand with his vision. Each says he wants at least a million for his country's children. And serious talks are underway with Ethiopia, Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam and others.

Now called XO, the device has evolved into something both practical and sleek. Gone is the second prototype's hand-cranked generator, meant to free students from the need for an electric plug. (One broke off in Kofi Annan's hands when he demonstrated it at a UN tech conference last year.) Instead, the XO comes with a separate fist-sized generator. You pull a cord to make juice, like starting an old lawn mower.

The XO comes with tiny stereo speakers and three USB slots. It can be used as a conventional laptop or - with the screen twisted around - as a booklike tablet. The screen itself is a feat of energy-conserving innovation. As necessary, it can be read like paper with entirely reflected light or be illuminated completely from within. The user experience is also coolly state-of-the-art. A few bars by U2 play as the machine starts up. The Wikimedia Foundation, among others, is working on content.

If current plans hold, One Laptop Per Child will start building millions of XOs next summer and will ship at least 50 million a year by the end of 2008. That is more than all the laptops sold worldwide last year. The initial price will be closer to $150 but is projected to drop to $100 by the end of 2008.

Any project this grand is sure to have its detractors. The most vociferous is Intel (Charts). Erstwhile CEO Craig Barrett wrote to Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo criticizing the project. In an accompanying memo, Intel staffers wrote, "The OLPC represents a limited version of the modern PC, reliant on old hardware that limits its functionality." That's just wrong, though the XO does use a low-power chip from Intel archrival AMD (Charts).

While the letter hasn't deterred Obasanjo, big obstacles remain for Negroponte. Not least is the provision of reliable Internet access in remote regions. His plans for that remain unconvincing.

But even if Negroponte doesn't succeed, he is already pushing computer access forward. Intel has promised Nigeria software worth $10 million and 3,000 "fully functional" (in Intel's words) desktop PCs. Negroponte says, "It makes my day" when OLPC motivates others to get poor kids computers faster. And giving them a PC that even rich people will want is bound to do something good.

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http://www.olpcnews.com/implementation/pla..._classmate.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/ma...layer3415.shtml

http://www.olpctalks.com/nicholas_negropon..._interview.html

Perhaps they could just send food....but they proved attendance grows which is good for the whole country. But you gotta wonder why Intell wants to take over this. Even if intell sells them one under cost, it is still not free to the kids really. This guy gets them to the kids for free, plus he invented one that the screen can be in the sun, plus no sand or water will hurt the keypad.....its made KID PROOF they even have protection from theft

one laptop per child

I dont understand why he is SELLING the laptops to other countries though if they are bought by us, if we perchase one in this country....if we are online that is......its a nonprofit......I know they have SOME costs.....

but seems it Intell would be LOSING money and it would cost them more to set this up and get them there. But This Nick guy is getting to go see the world doing this....

I guess he still needs money to travel and set up stuff....but it is cool what he is doing. He probably made so much he is retired anyway by now....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Negroponte