Is One Laptop Per Child Winding Down? 111
An anonymous reader sends this quote from OLPC News about whether the One Laptop Per Child project can expect to continue much longer:
"Here is a question for you: 8 years on, would you recommend anyone start a new deployment with XO-1 laptops? With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project."
A response from OLPC says their mission is "far from over." They add, "OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education."
Winding down? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to be snarky, but did it ever wind up?
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They certainly had a presence. I used to see booths and hardware at tech related events and conventions, though they were usually smaller ones.
I always figured this for a temporary project: it was a concept laptop that made many many compromises to achieve a price goal. Pretty cool in that respect. That price goal is now being met (or nearly met) by other products ranging from crappy tablets to crappy chromebooks.
Shame to see it go because it also had the philanthropic mission angle that I suspect is not do
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They still do booths. They had one at SCALE at the end of February.
Re:Winding down? (Score:4, Insightful)
also: no one on slashdot ever "hate[s] to be snarky." Ever.
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It was displaced by the "one cellphone per child" consumer-initiated movement.
Bingo! If it weren't for Apple trying to get $40 per Android phone, we could be seeing $100 cell phones more powerful than the original OLPC.
They just need to teach basic electronics, give away the assembly that charged the battery with a crank, and let poor people adapt it to fit whatever cell phone battery they have.
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Speaking of which, in the 1990s, prior to Al Gore finding his niche as Eco Savior/ManBearPig, he was leading a previous crusade that might have been called One Desktop With Internet Per Poor Family, to the applause of CEOs of companies like HP. This was before Obamafones.
Wut?
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How dare you bring facts into this... HOLY Regan never did such a thing... the great SATAN Obama and his Stalin SOCALISIM created that!
to repent you must repeat out loud the "tear down this wall" speech 3 times with an american flag draped over your head.
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I hate to be snarky, but did it ever wind up?
That was how you charged the battery, wasn't it?
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touche
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No. The hardware never met expectations and it never really got to the kids. Most were confiscated by the local dictators and sold off. Honestly, it should have been epaper displays, but they did not want to pay for those, (epaper is still horribly overpriced) and honestly you could outfit a village with very old used toughbooks for the same price as all the XO's and the toughbooks were easier to get as well as having better specifications and rubber waterproof keyboards.
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No. The hardware never met expectations and it never really got to the kids. Most were confiscated by the local dictators and sold off.
Not just that. I thought the buy-1-give-1 program was awesome and my daughter was four at the time, so I thought it would be perfect. Christmas came and went and I never got a box in the mail. The office was clearly a mess.
I month or two later, I gave up after getting nowhere with those people, bought her a pink eeePC and all was well with the world. Especially ASUS's p
OLPC is the granddaddy of the Netbook (Score:2)
In fact, I would go so far as to say it quite literally changed computing by showing that a low power non-windows laptop could work (crank charger? hell yes). The form factor was closer to what made the Asus eeePC 701 famous - and get this, the even the name seems to derive from the OLPC mission [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Winding down? (Score:5, Informative)
Initially, yes. Go with the least expensive hardware possible and a tiny Linux installation and get them out to people who can learn from them.
Getting that hardware price-point was difficult. But they got close.
Then they decided that it needed to run some form of Windows.
The End.
Re:Winding down? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's vision is being fulfilled by the Raspberry Pi. Cheap and low power it offers a lot of possibilities for education and seems to fire the imagination and creativity in children.
Re:Winding down? (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think Pi is popular with the kids [youtube.com]? It seems to be a nerd-only thing that's popular mostly as a cheap XBMC box.
Low power? Is this really an issue for children, like their parents only let them draw two amps at a time for their main computing device?
And by the time you include a monitor, case, keyboard, etc, a netbook with monitor is going to be cheaper and draw less power and let them use the most popular and supported business/educational/entertainment software.
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Given the OLPC's target market, developing countries, yes, this is an issue. There isn't a stable grid, so you can only get electricity a few hours a day, at most, and there is not much of it...
Re:Winding down? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the third world, yes. If you live in a one room "house" with one solar panel, every watt-hour counts - if the laptop has to draw off the "house battery" because the laptop runs out of charge before daylight or another charging opportunity, that's going to mean you can't keep lights on to read by (although, with the advent of much cheaper LED lights, this may not be as much of a problem anymore).
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Well then hopefully they are able to use the computer without a monitor. Because a Pi with monitor is going to draw more power than a netbook, and FAR more power than a $50 Android cell phone.
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Raspberry? (Score:2)
Cheap it is, granted. And yes, its inceptors do (try to) target it at the educational market. I have in fact spotted several RPi machines at my university. However, getting a RPi usable to be part of a general science project is quite far from trivial. Yes, given its easily accessible GPIO, it's close to ideal. But basic and high school teachers rarely know enough to get a RPi to boot, don't even mention to control or monitor outside events.
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Expanding a bit from my previous post: Of course, interested kids will get their RPi going, and might end up making magic, just as many of us did with our 8-bit machines 25 years ago. However, the bar the OLPC set to itself was quite different — And might I say, much higher: To come up with a {product, system} that's made for kids. For all kids. To help them to learn about everything, not just about how to do I/O with a computer. An operating environment that's tailored to a constructuvist view of edu
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Re:Winding down? (Score:5, Informative)
Then they decided that it needed to run some form of Windows.
The End.
OLPC didn't decide it needed to run some form of Windows... Microsoft decided it needed some form of Windows. To not be left out, Microsoft ported WindowsXP. All OLPC did to support that was made sure OpenFirmWare would boot Windows (and subsequently standard Linux distros) to prevent Microsoft from completely overwriting the firmware with standard BIOS code preventing Sugar from booting ever again. http://lists.laptop.org/piperm... [laptop.org] OLPC still pushed for Linux / Sugar. All the stories I read were about the Sugar installs. Microsoft also pushed the Classmate to be a Windows platform.
Although OLPC had great intentions I feel there were several problems:
-Sugar was ridiculously slow. I know it's running on a crappy AMD Geode, but it was real slow.
-Assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer. One of the reasons Sugar is so slow is it's written in Python. Easy to modify, but being an interpreted language, it's slow. How high a priority is being able to modify the OS's GUI?
-Poor selection of apps. Poor selection of actual learning materials. Instead there's a million "learn to program" type apps, and some crappy games. Yes I think accessibility of learning to program is good, and lots of people on /. will talk about how hacking away on Basic on an Apple //, or POKE on C64 at their school got them into CompSci, you really are the minority. With the amount of money being spent on the things, they better really help with the basics of education (3 R's) first.
-Poor support of the deployments. In many cases it seemed they were dropped off, and it was up to the teachers to figure out. These are teachers not very familiar with computers, so what are they supposed to do with them?
-The platform doesn't age well with the students. Sugar is really targeted for young elementary students. I think if it was designed to have access to a standard Linux desktop (Xfce maybe? I think that's the one that hasn't gone to crap like KDE, Gnome, Unity and will run well on old junk) it would be good for older students, as well as opening up the platform to a lot more applications and resources. XO-1.5 at least was designed to dual boot Sugar and Fedora 11.
-Trying to be too much: Ground up building a new GUI, ground up building a new boot mechanism (OFW), wandering goal (XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75, XO-2, XO-3, XO-4), means they're not dedicated to supporting a certain platform for a longer period of time. With the amount of money these poor countries are spending on it, it should be a solid supported platform for a while.
Really I find a lot of these problems are shared with conventional technology platforms in education. At some point TV was going to be the be all and end all to education. Nope. Growing up my school had Apple //, Mac Classic, iMac, and eventually Windows PCs. Still questionable how much they added to the educational experience. I remember playing games and typing tutor on the Apple //, but there were three of them in the back of a class of 20 students. Although I could use a word processor / Spreadsheet programs (as a commonly toted example of why computers in school are important), it wasn't till University, or later "Real world" / workplace that I learned proper way of doing things (such as styles). At the very least in developing countries any push for computers (OLPC, Tablets, etc) should be a good ebook reader first, with tons of "open textbooks" / lesson plans, but I didn't see that materialize in OLPC.
In the developed world I see it continue. Look at the amount of schools spending ridiculous amounts of money on either laptops for each child, or tablets for each child. Do they actually do anything? In my Junior/Senior year in University there were students that did their Freshman/Sophmore year at a collage that re
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There is some thought, or hope, that the OLPC inspired netbooks (like the EeePC), and subsequently tablets, which are dropping in price. Hopefully some of these technologies might eventually advance education.
I kinda view OLPC and EEEPC as the initial starting point of the "ultra cheap computing" movement.
We look now and laugh, but the idea of a _$200_ computer was insanely luring just a few years ago.
The gods must be crazy. (Score:2)
Then they decided that it needed to run some form of Windows.
The End.
Bull.
The XO laptop was a product of the western media lab and a take-it-or-leave-it constructivist philosophy of education that proclaimed that teachers were of no consequence and that kids and their families could teach themselves.
There have been a bare 1.8 million OLPC laptops distributed
Most to Uruguay and Peru and almost none outside the Western Hemisphere. The notion that anyone could have believed OLPC was a culturally neutral ---- truly global solution ---for primary education seems laughable in r
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I don't really think that they got that close. The OLPC was supposed to be $100, and it never got down to less than $200 after several years after the initial promise.
That said, it help to launch the $300 netbook trend, soon followed by $100 7" Android tablets and cheap Windows based laptops. All of those caught on far better than OLPC did, and probably helped to get technology into low income households far better than the original project.
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Then they decided that it needed to run some form of Windows.
"They" being Nicholas Negroponte.
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No, "they" meaning the end users. They didn't want some bastard child of an OS, they wanted what everyone else in the world runs: Windows, and Office.
End of story.
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Not really. Most of us knew it was going to be a failure from the start. Now we can finally put this boondoggle behind us.
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"Flagship" (Score:5, Insightful)
Sugar is the horrible POS that made the XO-1 such a sluggish pain to use. If they had developed a lean UI rather than deploying some overarchitected academic project that was clearly never tested on the target hardware it would have been much more appealing.
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With a hard heart, I second this. I had the joy of having an XO-1.5 laptop for a good six months. Sugar is the biggest pain in the arse, It is great when i realised I was able to use gnome 2 on the laptop. Then it became usable.
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I've heard Sugar is the reason many of the kids learned to hack their first machine. That's a feature, not a bug.
Other Netbooks (Score:2)
Not surprised (Score:2)
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It wasn't silly when it began. When it started, ethere was nothing of the sort even remotely available on the market. More like, market has caught up and can produce hardware cheaper now.
Negroponte moved on? Shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
The founder of the MIT Media Lab, which churns out nothing but useless ivory-tower crap, moved on to something more shiny?
Shocking.
OLPC was nothing more than a way to pay for travel to academic conferences and get his name into stuff.
The OLPC Community does not depend on OLPC Corpora (Score:4, Interesting)
I and a few other volunteers set up a few new deployments just this past January (2014) in Haiti. 8 years on, the XO-1's are still great learning tools. There is still a supply, as a lot of people redonated their "get one," and the laptops themselves seem to last almost forever. Spare parts aren't all that hard to find, and there are dozens if not hundreds of developers and sysadmins still supporting existing deployments, with the more adventurous of us working on new ones.
For anyone interested in starting a new deployment with XO-1's, you can get in touch with us at http://unleashkids.org [unleashkids.org] and we can talk about the details.
OLPC served its purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
OLPC was a project to get computers into the hands of children in developing nations. This was at a time when a laptop for a hundred bucks was thought to be impossible...... and then along came smart phones and tablets.
The OLPC was made obsolete by these devices. You can now get Android tablets for under 50 bucks and have access to hundreds of thousands of apps on the Android OS. No longer are you stuck in a sandbox like system with limited hardware and software. Sure they arent as rugged but the low cost makes them more appealing and they are essentially throw away (though that is not necessarily a good thing)
See this:
http://globalnews.ca/news/1203449/canadian-makers-of-worlds-lowest-cost-tablet-aim-for-a-20-device/ [globalnews.ca]
Re:OLPC served its purpose (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree.
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
You can buy "white box" Android tablets at amazingly cheap prices because they are mass-produced in China. While these tablets fall short of the ideal devices imagined by OLPC, there is absolutely no way for OLPC to get their costs down to match.
You can buy at least three Android tablets for the cost of one OLPC device. You could bundle tablets with a keyboard, a carrying case, and maybe a solar panel, and still massively undercut the OLPC's custom hardware.
Cheap Android tablet's don't have great battery life. But I bought one of the original XO-1 laptops and it only had a few hours of battery life, so clearly OLPC must consider even the limited battery life of a cheap tablet to be sufficient.
One of the nifty things about the OLPC custom design is that it's easy to repair. But with the massive cost advantage of a generic Android tablet, whole spare tablets could be shipped.
The promise of Sugar never was realized. For example, one of the reasons I bought an XO-1 laptop was that I was excited by the thought of the "show source" key, where you were supposed to be able to go anywhere in the system, hit the "show source" key, and find some kind of editable Python source code you could tweak. I never did find any source to tweak before I gave away my laptop. (It's in India now!)
Another part of the OLPC custom hardware was the "mesh" networking, which aimed to make it possible for multiple students to cooperatively share limited networking resources. Did that ever actually get used? All the photos I have seen show students in classrooms, and if the classroom has WiFi then an Android tablet would work fine. If the "mesh" networking is valuable, then maybe OLPC should invest in a one-off gadget that just does that, and plugs into the USB port on an Android tablet.
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"If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop educational software that runs on standard Android tablets."
no....
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop FREE educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
This is what is needed, along with FREE educational texts in native languages. one of the largest problems is that there are not a lot of books printed in the languages of 3rd world countries. and absolutely no advanced education texts.
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no....
If OLPC wants a new mission, it should be to develop FREE educational software that runs on standard Android tablets.
Sure. They give away all the software they write already, and I assumed that they would give away any Android software they write. It seemed so obvious that I didn't feel the need to put in the word "free" but I guess I should have. Thanks for the comment.
one of the largest problems is that there are not a lot of books printed in the languages of 3rd world countries. and absolutely n
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As far as source code goes, press Shift+Alt+V. It's also available on the dropdown menu for the Activity. Maybe that feature was added after you gave your XO to India (thanks for redonating it so volunteers like me can get it into the hands of kids who need it); maybe it just wasn't included in the minimal guide. Yep, sometimes it's not a hardware or software issue; it's a lack of documentation.
Mesh networking is great! Students can use it
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I disagree. OLPC's purpose was to get their particular brand of cheap computers into the hands of children in developing nations. This was achieved on a limited scale, but seems to have faltered when cheap phones and tablets came around.
Now, if you want to move the goalposts and suggest that the overall purpose was simply to get computers, any computers, into the hands of children in developing nations, then it succeeded but not because of anything the OLPC project did. Android did that, coupled with the pr
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To add to what LoRdTAW said:
The landscape of computer education has also changed tremendously, and for the better. Whether this was stimulated by the OLPC project or not is an open question, but there has been a change.
Computers in education pretty much meant a computer running a web processor, a word processor, and a smattering of poorly designed educational products when the XO-1 was introduced. Since then the "constructionist" philosophy of Papert, which was the framework of computer education in the 1
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This was at a time when a laptop for a hundred bucks was thought to be impossible.....
... and it was impossible. The project has never shipped anything below $200.
and then along came smart phones and tablets.
...which are not laptops and most of which still cost more than $100 (at least the ones you would actually like to own).
The OLPC was made obsolete by these devices.
Right, blame those mean commercial manufacturers for making your flawed-premise hype-driven project a failure.
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The less than $100 stuf is getting better. 800x480 Firefox OS phones have been presented, with dual Cortex A7 and 512MB RAM (and SD slot to give it more storage than a high end smartphone). If a Firefox phablet is $100, 1280x720 with the same specs that's getting pretty usable.
OLPC was the shot across the bow (Score:3, Insightful)
The OLPC XO-1 enpirically demonstrated that one could manufacture a self-contained device that could credibly be called a "computer" for $100. While that's no big deal today, it was unheard of a decade ago, and the XO-1 stood as the empirical proof it was possible.
Phones perhaps? (Score:3)
I'm affraid my current smartphone probably has more memory, more storage and is faster than my 8 years old single core laptop running W-XP.
So how about one smartphone per child?
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This. The world has changed, OLPC no longer has a credible goal in hardware. Netbooks have come and gone, and that is the end of that.
Now educational software, that is a demand that still has to be met in any serious way.
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Anticipate the convergence of the evolution in useful netlinked hardware with the growth of your target audience.
Shoot for One Google-Walker Per Senior.
The OLPC Underground (Score:5, Interesting)
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YES! The real story (if anyone wants to research it, many PhDs will be written) is that the bulk OLPC's institutional capacity wound down in the Prior Decade (innovation thrived in 2007-2009 especially) largely replaced by a far larger global community of DIY implementers. In particular olpcMAP.net is an unauthorized *treasure*, entirely crowdsourced and volunteer-run, far more comprehensive than OLPC's own "official" map. The reason is that country after country realized our children Won't Wait for bureauc
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from something offensive, we knew it was doomed.
Yeah, 'cos people who live in countries called Niger and Nigeria get real offended by some guy called Negroponte.
Idiot.
TLPC (Score:1)
Time to double down
OLPC is being replaced by olpc 2.0 (Score:1)
A few weeks ago OLPC 2.0 had a presence at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 12X). Far from being "dead," it was as big a hit as ever. Of course, these were folks who are interested in open course software in education (OSSIE). There were deployers from several different countries sharing their stories and hardware/software developers demonstrating their work. Many people there showed interest in joining in this global movement to improve the education and lives of children everywhere.
People have cr
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I'm not really an "Anonymous Coward!" My name is Caryl Bigenho and I have been a volunteer with OLPC and Sugar Labs for over 6 years.
OS agnosticism is a mistake (Score:2)
Getting children used to a free, non-proprietary operating system -- weaning them off Microsoft's teats, so to say -- is a social good in itself. To abandon this goal was a huge mistake.
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Last time I heard the word Agnostic used, it was Microsoft did not believe in software.
As usual... (Score:1)
... technology and the marketplace responded far more quickly, more cheaply, and vastly more efficiently than an NGO like OLPC could or would.
I wonder how much money was wasted funding this organization?
OLPC vs EEPC (Score:5, Informative)
I bought one of the OLPCs (actually two, as part of the "give one get one" charity program) for my daughter who was in the target age group at the time - and shortly thereafter I also bought an EEPC running Linux. The result - user acceptance of the EEPC blew the OLPC into the weeds. The OLPC was on minor novelty value, and that was all. The Atom processor on the EEPC smoked the Geode of course, and the native apps has far better performance of course than the Python programs on the OLPC, but the real kicker was this: the EEPC let my daughter do thins she actually wanted to do! What a concept!
It is sad to such a significant amount of money and creativity being poured into a such a "broken by design" project. You pick the slowest processor out there (since low power consumption was apparently a pre-eminent goal of the project). But then you put very inefficient software on it. And it is not even a good app suite!
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As I said many, many times during OLPC's early years, they should have brought it to market globally as a secondary source of revenue and driver of innovation. Props to focusing on education products for the least-served, but the OLPC created the industry niche for netbooks (and arguably, then, tablets), and then after hyping it up, refused to enter the market. They quickly got lapped by hardware that wasn't as open or as rugged, but was available to anyone for a low price. Once the netbook market got ch
Ok (Score:2)
Good idea tries to get low-cost hardware and a good educational platform OS into the hands of poor people.
Big American corporation comes along and drowns idea in a bathtub.
Big American corporation offers touch-screen television remote controls (which they call "smart" phones) as a replacement.
Everyone cheers.
The end.
Quoting fake OLPC advocacy site .. (Score:2)
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Doomed to repeat (Score:2)
"Papert and Negroponte distributed [computers] to school children in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal. The experience confirms one of Papert's central assumptions: children in remote, rural, and poor regions of the world take to computers as easily and naturally as children anywhere. These results will be validated in subsequent deployments in several countries, including Pakistan, Thailand, and Colombia. [...] Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization backed by a socialist gov
Windows 8 requirement of proprietary hardware done (Score:1)
With Windows 8 requirement of a license by the proprietary hardware in order to perform a simple Linux install, is wrong. Its real bad. Just say NO to proprietary hardware.
Re-purposing a computer for One Laptop per Child or some other education use is why I buy all my hardware (PC, laptop and tablet) from Linux ONLY vendors. I figure I can always purchase a Windows license if I want one, however down the road that Linux hardware will not require a Windows license to run Linux because of some stupid pro
OLPC not a failure (Score:2)
I bought an XO-1 from the first "Give One Get One" promotion many years ago. I was a bit disappointed with it, but I learned to write Activities for Sugar and eventually wrote a book on the subject which you may check out here:
https://archive.org/details/Ma... [archive.org]
I used my XO-1 as an e-book reader and was so pleased with it and all the thousands of free e-books available from archive.org and Project Gutenberg that I learned to create and donate books to these sites and wrote a book on that subject:
https://archi [archive.org]
Thanks for your contributions; my own experiences (Score:2)
Good points on dreams, and disappointments, and continuing hopes.
Here are some rambles of my own thoughts and experiences with OLPC and an independent software developer long interested in education (my wife and I made a free garden simulator in the 1990s).
I got two OLPs via the G1-G1 program. One never even made it out of the box, sadly. (I think of donating them somewhere sometimes, thinking it is better a kid has it than it becomes an unused collector's item.) I made a demo version of some of our plant g
Tech per child winding down? (Score:1)
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Indoctrination happens either way. Just look at how many people end up with the religion of the dominant culture of their region.
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Only because we don't flat out ban it.
Each childs mind should be there's to invent and create on their own. Not their parents, not the governments, not religious nuts, not the corporations, and not advertisers.
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So ban all education? It's all mind control...
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You understand what "white man's burden" means, right? It's not a synonym of "charity". It's "deeming other cultures unable to properly rule themselves as an excuse".
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mind control indoctrination at it's finest.
image a world where you didn't need the internet. you didn't need to be connected to one another, and you lived your life dealing with what you had locally. you would turn out to be smarter, faster, and more proficient, perhaps, spending less days associating with a screen that merely duplicated what everyone else was viewing. literally, all your experience would come from working with the real world, and not being driven into the pleasure of having information fro
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Not only commuters, but drivers. I used to see people driving and reading a book all the time, now they just have a tablet.
My favorite was a guy passing traffic at 90 while playing a trumpet.
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you realize that the.. exact opposite has been the norm throughout human existance right? isolated groups of people do not develop things like "science" and "technology". if you want that lifestyle, go to somewhere like papau new guinea and see it first hand.
the mindless obsession with cell phones and facebook IS stupid. but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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I actually did live in the time you describe, and guess what: people like you complained in precisely the same terms about what the amount of TV we watched was doing to our minds. And what do you miss, exactly, when you are "no longer interacting with" that fascinating intellectual ferment of souls you meet on the city bus?
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image a world where you didn't need the internet. you didn't need to be connected to one another, and you lived your life dealing with what you had locally. you would turn out to be smarter, faster, and more proficient, perhaps, spending less days associating with a screen that merely duplicated what everyone else was viewing. literally, all your experience would come from working with the real world, and not being driven into the pleasure of having information from a source that you normally don't gain an
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Think of all the poor kids who would be without worthless computers today had it not been for this program.
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Their current device is basically a ruggedized Android tablet; there are plenty of those available in toystores for less.
With regards to hardware and OS, they've gone as far as they can and the market has taken over.
They should focus on distribution to poor countries and the application side of things (which seems to be exactly what they're doing).