Venezuela Purchases a Million Intel Classmates 275
An anonymous reader submits news of the million-laptop order from Venezuela of Intel's version of the kid-friendly laptop. The computers are produced in Portugal. "The machines, rebranded 'Magellan,' will also come with Linux pre-installed as opposed to Windows XP. This order alone is 50% bigger than the entire OLPC project has managed to sell worldwide."
lolwut (Score:5, Insightful)
So now OLPC comes with windoze and classmates come with Linux? o_O
Tables have turned I gather!
political title - now make it work (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on the intelligence of the kid (Score:4, Insightful)
Technology in education has a great deal of potential when you put a computer in each kids hands.
Computers don't change the intelligence of kids, but they may help their motivation.
You cannot educate a congenital idiot into being a genius. You can make him flip burgers faster however.
I think people are hoping that buying computers for kids is the "magic bullet" to somehow turn them all into middle-class level performers.
No scientific evidence exists that shows that will work.
Some useful research:
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature [amazon.com], by Stephen Pinker -- proves beyond a doubt that intelligence and personality are almost exclusively heritable.
* The Bell Curve [amazon.com], by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray -- although the portion about race attracted the most media attention, the real point of the book is that intelligence in populations follows a distribution curve so that only a few are actually all that smart.
You can see why people go into "cognitive dissonance" when they see this evidence. We all like to think we can be anyone we want to be. But just like few are as handsome as Paul Newman, few are smart enough to achieve the kind of results that are desired.
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole.
Pentti Linkola [penttilinkola.com]
That's capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't allow there to be so many AMD chips out there...
That's fair play under the rules of capitalism.
And if we want "freedom," we probably don't want a whole bunch of rules about what's fair play.
Then again, maybe we can do better than a capitalist system.
Good for Venezuela (Score:5, Insightful)
Although its popular on both left and right to demonise Chavez, I think his rule will have a long term positive effect. Regardless of the current state of Venezuela, the Missions he created are contributing to a healthier and better educated population which is the foundation of future success.
I predict he will be out in a few years, and Venezuela will continue on a roughly social democratic route. The idea that he is turning it into another Cuba is just absurd hysterical screeching from the elite he has pissed off by treating the Venezuelan poor like human beings for a change.
Re:Magellan computers make me sick (Score:4, Insightful)
I know for a different reason. [youtube.com]
All the best stuff I know I learned from cartoons.
Turns out that I'd never heard "Get Along, Little Doggie" before that, either.
Re:Made up or unsourced quotes? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's being sold to kids in primary school for 50 euros and it comes with an option for mobile internet, which you can buy from mobile carriers. If you're not a primary school student, well you've got to pay 285 euros for one.
The little I know about Portuguese culture brings me to expect a lot of these machines will be sold for %= EUR, but not to kids only. There's ways to abuse the system, and I suspect it will be abused.
Re:That's capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
The OLPC is a nice toy and Negroponte gets credit for creating the netbook category, but that's it. Face it, the hardware is slow and not really special - oops sorry, the case has pretty kiddie colors. You could make the case that the OS is something new, but I don't see a huge clamor to bring it into every classroom everywhere. My kids use whatever OS is put in front of them. They take a while to find how to do stuff, then they do it. Where's the demand for the OLPC? They want to put nonstandard hardware and software in the hands of kid's in the 3rd world. Apparently, Secretaries of Education everywhere are scratching their heads wondering why they would put their kids on a different track than the rest of the world. And somewhere down the road the kids would have to be retrained to use standard PC's. Why?
The OLPC project should return to it's original vision of giving one laptop per child and get out of the hardware & software market. Change the mission to helping fund computer acquisitions. If they took all the money they wasted on hardware and software development they could have put more laptops out there by now.
OLPC is a classic example of why the market is better at developing and bringing products to market - better, faster, cheaper. Don't put the blame on Intel.
Re:Depends on the intelligence of the kid (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is a modest proposal:
The races may not be equal because different races represent different sub-evolutionary strategies of human groups who moved to different parts of the world long ago. Each race has capabilities that represent adaptation to a particular environment.
If we get away from a discussion of saying one race is inferior or superior to the other, can we have an objective discussion on these differences?
A lot of the modern science regarding racial differences has come to the conclusion that Jews and East Asians have the highest intelligence, so its not some sort of "nazi" type propaganda. Some of us just want to have honest discussions rather than emotion-laden ones that this thread invariably degenerates to. I'm not even Jewish or Asian, yet this topic is fascinating to me.
Why can't y'all just step away from your ego and emotionalism and have a talk?
Re:Good for Venezuela (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Made up or unsourced quotes? (Score:5, Insightful)
oh c'mon. you don't think if the same deal were offered in the U.S., U.K., or any other western nation that you wouldn't also have people abusing the system?
i mean, 285 euros is pretty affordable for most Americans, but i still see people going into stores to buy these for their "kids" and then just keeping the laptop for themselves. consumers want the best deal possible as well. that's the flip side of capitalism.
Re:Made up or unsourced quotes? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just more likely to happen in Portugal than in Sweden or Finland. I don't know enough about the US to say one way or the other. And in fact, the post you are attacking does not mention anything regarding the US.
Re:Magellan computers make me sick (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello,
While I disagree with the usefulness of this programme as stated I have some comments on your remarks:
"We are talking about a 900 MHz refurbished Intel Classmate PC that is both ugly, heavy, and marketed as "built in Portugal", which is _not_!"
They are partially made in Portugal, which is better than not made in Portugal at all - from a Government POV companies that develop and build here should be favoured, and I agree. As for the ugly and heavy, so is the OLPC and pretty much every laptop in the segment, they're ultimate value is utilitarian.
"And the choice of operating systems is appalling! We can either stick with Window XP or Caixa Mágica, a portuguese GNU/Linux distribution that is horribly produced, horrible to use, horrible to maintain, but thrown around at every state sponsored GNU/Linux deployment. No wonder people dislike GNU/Linux after using Caixa Mágica..."
I disagree with your descrition. Instead of a Portuguese distribution that has been developed for years now and to some extent commercially successful and fully localised - not only language-wise but also in terms of local available ISPs and other peculiarities - they should have used something else? Like, let me guess, Ubuntu - which seems what everyone and their dog propose nowadays whenever they hear that something else is available?
This is exactly part of the reason why GNU/Linux user distributions more often then not fail when bundled: there is always a distro-du-jour that describes the one included as "horrible", and people just say "Fuck *this*, if even Linux users say this is braindead [because it uses apt/yum/emerge instead of yum/emerge/apt and other really life-defining stuff] I will just use Windows". Which, more often than not, they do.
Re:Made up or unsourced quotes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good for Venezuela (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That's capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
There are a lot of unproven beliefs here on /. and one of them is the belief in a utopia created by a free market. It is commonly supported here. Then someone comes along and finds that it isn't doing what they want and they'll say it is corruption, bribing, etc... They do this without any evidence to support their statements. Much like they believe in this fictional market as a cure.
What they forget is that we're humans and those genes haven't been removed yet and probably won't. Self preservation and greed are short term goals that are a part of who we are. The true irony is when they come and say that they're "naturalists" (as has been done before here) and completely ignore the fact that being natural means being true to your genetics, being things like an omnivore, and having the instincts to gather all you can in case lean times are in the future.
It is as if they think we've reached *the* high point which is odd because they seem to believe in evolution. The belief is that they have the answers now, don't need to substantiate them, and then go on to ignore much of what they claim to believe in.
The sad truth is that we're here for a short time and if we kill off a huge percentage of the population both the environment and the resulting changes in our species or learning would certainly better us as a whole. The claim is that people don't think long-term enough. The reality is that those who claim to think in advance are only being very short term thinkers as far as the scope of existence.
Re:Good for Venezuela (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The benefits of not ordering with Windows (Score:4, Insightful)
and in the interviews i've watched of Chavez, he comes off as a surprisingly intelligent person--i had no idea national leaders could be like that.
Funny, I've watched some interviews of him, too. I think he sounds stark raving mad. I had no idea national leaders could be like that, either. XD
Re:Made up or unsourced quotes? (Score:4, Insightful)
did i say there were no cultural differences? i'm simply saying that the trait you're describing is a universal _human_ trait, not a Portuguese one.
granted, i've never traveled to Europe, but i've traveled to different parts of Asia and spent a significant part of my life outside of the U.S. i've even spent most of childhood adjusting to the cultural differences between Taiwan and the United States. i know very well how different cultural values can affect a society's development. but some things are constant. as much as you'd like to look down on another society for what you perceive as cultural shortcomings, people are generally more alike than they are different. we're just socialized to not see the corruption which goes on in our own society. that is the result of your cultural lens.
some governments are indeed more corrupt than others, but people in capitalist societies possess certain traits regardless of what culture they were raised in. do you honestly think that greed and corruption are distinctly Portuguese characteristics? you don't think Swedish or Finnish CEOs embezzle from their companies or exploit the economic system to their advantage?
Re:That's capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
The hardware is "special" for several reasons. Mesh networking mitigates the lack of networking infrastructure in most of the places these are getting deployed. The absurdly high resolution screen also supports dropping into transflective grayscale for use in sunlight. Under normal load, it pulls around 4w, and goes below 1w in ebook mode (cpu, wifi, and backlight off). Of course, theres also the sealed keyboard, rugged design with no moving parts, LiFePO4 battery, security LEDs on the webcam and microphone, and so on. All of these things add up to show the key difference between the XO and the Classmate. The Classmate is a laptop made as cheaply as possible; the XO was designed from the ground up for education in the developing world.
You've also contradicted yourself about the software. On one hand, you say kids will figure out how to use whatever is on front of them, but then it must be some huge effort to retrain kids to use Windows down the line? Beyond the obvious contradiction there, you are also assuming that the XO exists to teach kids how to use computers. That is a secondary goal at most. The goal is to provide educational tools. I agree that Sugar is far from perfect, but it is improving every day. (And I mean that literally, the development builds seem to be released on a daily basis). The OS was designed largely to maximize the benefit of networking for collaboration. Pretty much anything that exists on one laptop, from Activities to content, to specific sessions done in an Activity can be shared with other XOs on the network. In addition, many Activities allow for multiple kids to be using it cooperatively.
Regardless, politics seems to come into play more than the merits of either program in bulk orders like this. In this case, Venezuela would much rather make friends with the Portuguese government than an American non-profit.
Re:Depends on the intelligence of the kid (Score:1, Insightful)
I am not the moderator of your post, though I have moderated posts in this story and thus now I post as AC.
The reason IMO your post is flamebait is:
That is flamebait because it implicitly argues that "cannot be racist because he/she is a Jew". That correlation simply does not exist. What you were doing is "positive discrimination". There are racists that are Jews just as there are racists that are Budhists/Christians/Muslims/Atheists.
Re:Good for Venezuela (Score:3, Insightful)
This conversation is being derailed, I am venezuelan and you cant prove i am not. In fact why the hell would i lie about that?
You could point out that your posting record, easily available with a single mouse click, obviously shows you at least have a deep interest in Venezuela along with a lot of demonstrated knowledge about it.
People have difficulty dealing with Chavez in the "western world." The man is obviously intentionally antagonistic, which understandably leads to a lot of people, even those who might normally be more moderate, seeing him as the devil incarnate, or at least incredibly annoying. The extreme level of this response leads opponents of cultural and economic imperialism to take a rather extreme response in opposition. They genuinely think Chavez is a wonderful leader, ignoring corruption, torture, etc. There are several posts here today responding to Chavez's torture record (hey, just like we have in the good ol' US of A) by saying it's okay, because he's torturing business owners and such, who are obviously the scum of the Earth.
My tentative perspective is that Chavez really is an improvement, economically, for a lot of the people in the country, but that this is only because predecessors were particularly bad. If a man like Chavez were suddenly made the effective dictator of the UK, he'd be seen as the worst tyrant in two hundred years.
Re:Good for Venezuela (Score:3, Insightful)
No, Chavez has aspirations of dictatorship. You can now go to jail for over 3 years for simply saying 'Chavez is a crank' in Venezuela. He's cracking down on freedom of speech, and his hobby of trying to provoke the United States has turned from an amusing hobby to a bogeyman to blame everything on. When he silences a political opponent, he simply says the opponent was an agent of the United States and throws them out of the country or jails them.
Chavez might once have had promise for doing something great for Venezuela. However, sadly, he's now sliding towards dictatorship with all that implies (i.e. doing only things that will keep him in power).