1 Million OLPCs Already On Order

alphadogg writes "Quanta Computer has confirmed orders for 1 million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The article goes into some background on the project, and lays out the enthusiastic adoption that the project is seeing overseas. The company estimates they'll ship somewhere between 5 and 10 Million units this year, with 7 countries already signed up to receive units. The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable. Even with the low cost, Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier."

I can use a small stack at home

[viking2000]

I'll buy a stack of these for things like:
-Universal remote
-home automation
-kids games
-nursing room monitor
-Entrance door camera/display/speaker/mic
-Asterisk PBX
-Picture frame for grandma
-etc

Re:I Want One

[Pollardito]

Early on in this project I thought the public would be able to buy one at an inflated price (something like $300), the inflated portion of which would be used to send more laptops to more kids.

that's because someone ran an unofficial petition of "i'd buy one for 3x the price, with the extra profit going toward a donation of 2 for third-world countries" that was promoted on Slashdot many, many times. only some of those times was it made clear that the petition was not at all affiliated with the real project, so i think a lot of people assumed that if they got enough signatures it might happen or that it was already a planned program.

Re:The Equal Opportunity World of the Future

[Golias]

Lots of people get by in life without being able to do arithmetic in their heads. They can balance their checkbooks and everything. Why? Because you can walk into any dime store and pick up a machine that will do it for you.

Are you better off knowing how to divide 72 by 9 in your head? Sure, when it comes up in daily life it's handy not to have to reach for the calculator.

However, with the energy that you and I once applied to rote memorization of multiplication tables, some of those kids could be learning something else.

Like how to speak and read Chinese, for example. In the business world, such a skill would be vastly more important. So would higher math skills.

In my tech career, I have *never* been called on to use my recall of the multiplication table, but I have often had to write out and grok rather complex algebra and/or calculus problems. My 3rd grade 'rithmetic has never come up, but my High School pre-calc has always given me an edge. If I could have skipped all that rote learning entirely and gone straight to geometry and algebra at a young age, I would probably be even better off now than I am.

All the high-paying jobs for people who are good at basic math went away with the spreadsheet. The days of the green visors and sleeve cuffs are OVER. Why should we run our schools as if we are preparing kids for them?

Math skills don't even help you get your taxes done any faster these days. My federal and state returns were done using on-line tax software in an hour and ten minutes, never required me to figure out even a single sum, and were probably more accurate than my returns from five years ago.

I'm sure you are very proud at being better at math than your kid sister, but your instant recall of 4*8=32 doesn't really give you any kind of competitive edge in the real world anymore. Stop kidding yourself that it does.