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OLPC Available to the Public Early 2008
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jan 10, 2007 01:43 PM
from the but-is-it-a-tax-writeoff dept.
from the but-is-it-a-tax-writeoff dept.
Zoxed writes "The BBC is reporting that the OLPC will be available to the public early next year on a buy-2-get-1 basis through eBay. With its cheap price, fully open spec. and full/open hardware support for Linux, expandability, 2W rating and LinuxBIOS booting it sounds like an embedded-Linux hackers favorite new toy."
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OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Between the Gates foundation, guys like mark cuban, the google billionaires, and this type of thing, I love how philanthropy in this millennium is poised to be dominated by nerds.
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The OLPC project is still a great idea; nobody said phi
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely not. Now, giving water treatment facilities and facilities to produce vaccines, THAT is helpful. But simply giving the people the things makes them dependent on you, which is what a lot of these organizations really want. "We want to save you - and only we know how!"
Parent
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The reason its so exciting to see philanthropy dominated by folks like Bill Gates or Mark Shut
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Now, a water treatment facility would be a different story,
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes if you are have more basic needs it won't help, but not everyone in Africa is starving in a mud hut.
Parent
Re:OLPC? (Score:5, Insightful)
OLPC laptops are for children in developing and developed countries whose governments are interested in moving their education system forward. They are not, and never have been, something that a government should spend money on if there are higher priority needs such as sanitation, food, shelter or an energy network. They are targetted very specifically at countries who have a working sanitation and drinking water system, who have a viable food market, who have a working power infrastructure. Don't be thinking that the countries who are signing up to this are populated by starving Africans who have no electricity and drink from a muddy river. That is not the case. Most of the countries who have joined in are actually not in Africa, and all of them have the necessary basics in place already. Hell, one of the countries on board is the USA (well, a state in the USA, but hey..).
The OLPC project seeks to improve the IT education of children in countries who are providing the basics but cannot (or will not) afford IT equipment. That is a problem, and it's one that is being solved in an innovative and exciting way. There really isn't any downside.
If you feel your money will work better donated to a different cause then spend it elsewhere. You have that choice. I'm glad you're thinking of others. That's more than a lot of people manage. Personally, I'll buy a couple of these computers if it means a couple of kids in Tunisia get a chance to hack some Python. Who knows, they might be the ones who create 2020's version of Google.
Parent
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Also, this particular tool is
Why do so many people miss the economics?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
An OLPC comes with ebook textbooks. The cost of the OLPC is at worst the same as paper textbooks. The OLPC textbooks can be updated as often as necessary instead of being obsolete castoffs, and they are in the native language instead of a foreign language. The child can carry all of them around without weight penalty.
They also provide light from the screen if necessary, and they provide communication with the other OLPCs and with the big wide world. Pa
Re:OLPC? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you give people the technology to purify their own water and manufacture their own vaccines, then they are no longer dependent on you.
Now, it's an improbably large leap from giving kids to computers to expecting them to become white-coated boffins who are going to save the world, and I would certainly expect anyone who made such a statement to back it up with a long argument. But something good is bound to happen as a result of this. Give the right creative materials to enough kids, and some of them will come up with something amazing. Bear in mind also that while we might consider it primitive by the standards we've come to expect of a computer, a lot of these kids literally won't have seen anything like it before. It's a real hands-on learning tool. The main storage is a bit on the meagre side, but it ought to hold enough reading matter to last between opportunities to download some more. It's programmable in Python, which isn't exactly the hardest language in the world; and it's got a sensor input which allows for all sorts of experiments. I'm not suggesting that it's the first easily-programmed computer with the ability to attach weird and wonderful things to it; the BBC Model B had a nice fast structured BASIC and even more versatile user I/O, but you were lucky to have one beeb per classroom.
With this thing, there's bound to be some kid smart enough to figure out something amazingly useful to do with it and who isn't put off by the thought that this computer is a bit limited. They probably won't invent a cheap, pocket-sized device that supplies unlimited free energy, purifies raw sewage into drinkable water and turns deserts into fertile fields; at least, not straight away. But what I can see happening is clean, safe, modern factories being built to churn these things out in the numbers in which they will be needed, where they are needed, and revitalising economies by creating good jobs. And I can see small but significant improvements to things like crop yields and medical treatment in less built-up areas, thanks just to better communication and information-sharing abilities. How much food is lost because a crop starts to bolt, and nobody else finds out in enough time to get theirs safely gathered in? Or how often do people harvest needlessly early, for fear that that will happen? How many lives could be saved by early intervention, if people only knew a bit of basic first aid and could recognise the symptoms of easily-cured diseases? How much other damage is being done by superstitions clung to out of ignorance? I honestly don't know. But when you've got whole maths classes analysing local data, and readily-available newspapers and textbooks on all subjects, this sort of thing really can't not happen.
And these kids are never going to know anything other than the Open Source way of doing things. They won't have preconceived ideas about sharing vs. stealing. That ought to put the frighteners on the Closed Source software vendors.
Parent
Good present for grandparents as well? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Good present for grandparents as well? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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It also attaches the stigma of stealing from a child to whoever did so.
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After all, they're not looking to do presentations or calculate multi-column spreadsheets. The retired set is looking to put out Christmas letters and keep track of their investments, at worst.
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-- Ryan, AbiWord Dev, Win32 Maintainer, and Art Lead
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My cell phone is $150 at t-Mobile with a 2 yr contract, or $200 with a 1 year. On e-bay, unlocked, it is $165.
It runs Windows Mobile 5.0, has WIFI, uses very little power thus could be charged off cheap solar power. It has 200MHz processor at over 2GB of disk space, 64MB RAM.
I have Opera, Skype, VNC, and other applications on it. For $20 I have added 2GB of disk space from the base 64. It has bluetooth and I can hook a bluetooth mouse/keyboard to it.
Sure, th
Re:Good present for grandparents as well? (Score:4, Interesting)
But beyond that, you're quite correct- my T-Mobile MDA which I purchased when it was *much* more expensive ($495 with a 2-year contract) is exactly the type of platform I'd like to give to cutomers, except for the aforementioned problem of keyboard and screen (lack of USB type A host connector is also a problem, but I'm working on that one- Windows Mobile 5.0 supports USB OTG, and all that is required is a special cable with a separate power source).
Parent
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From a personally perspective I would love to get my hands on one for my four year old neice. She is fasinated by computers and to give her, her very own personal one (preferably in
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Your average $50 laptop off of EBay doesn't fit the bill. But a $300 OLPC, that ALSO gives to a cha
Will it be the _exact_ same laptop? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Will it be the _exact_ same laptop? (Score:5, Funny)
Yep. Exactly like how PBS telethons have encouraged the mugging of ladies carrying bags or men sipping coffee by setting the value of cloth bags and mugs at $120.
Parent
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I think your parent has a point. At some point we're going to see these on ebay, and we'll think, gee, I hope this wasn't one of the ones Pakistan bought to give some kid a future. And you just know there will be a Terrorist captured with one at some point, and it'll be a big story. Any way you look at it, there will be some retrospection on whether the laptops ended up doing what they were "supposed" to do, and so
Better than a donation (Score:3)
I would buy one. (Score:2, Interesting)
They should totally open the hardware to hacking
hell even encourage it. Maybe a power Adapter hack
incase you want to do something like coding.
i dont know, just throwing ideas out..
Re:I would buy one. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's more open than anything you'll find in an American store.
The hardware needs to be durable and sealed tight (to keep out dust), so I think encouraging hardware hacks may work against the goals of giving poor children a long-lasting device. But that's not to say you couldn't take a hacksaw to it and explore... no doubt, many people will do just that once it's put on the market..
Parent
Africa (Score:3)
Is it a good move? (Score:2)
If the real world price of this laptop is $200 (it is what the buyer pays, regardless of the fact that one is going to 3rd world country), and it is being sold to people in 3rd world countries for $100, then wouldn't this cause _not_so_good_people_ to buy/steal from the poor people and sell it here?
Even if they are just selling it to the poor countries (and not giving it through ebay at al
Couple Thoughts: Case Color and Good Idea.. (Score:5, Interesting)
b: You can stop the reselling problem (one worry is always that by selling them you'd create an adult market and therefore encourage theft) by a simple expedient: a different color case. Make purchased OLPCs black, and kid ones in cheerful old-school iMac colors, and now they are vastly different products from a retail viewpoint.
Re:Couple Thoughts: Case Color and Good Idea.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
OLPC and it's cultural implications (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's only being distributed to people who pay for it. I don't think they're going to deny any comers, though. It's not like these things are powerful enough to be classified as munitions or anything :D
The whole world is becoming more modern... except those parts that have been shit upon by some more powerful organization (usually a nation, b
No hand crank! (Score:2)
They replaced the hand crank with some yo-yo thing. I find that hugely annoying, even if the yo-yo thing works better. They totally trashed my dream of bringing a bright green wind up laptop to a vendor demo and annoying the hell out them cranking my obscenely bright laptop in the middle of their presentation and sending mesh text messages to my co-workers.
I asked for a hand crank, instead I get some yo-yo thing. Humpfh.
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My god! I think you may have just read your father's mind!
(kidding, kidding. Couldn't resist)
umm..network access? (Score:2)
Put them everywhere, 1st world & 3rd... (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at what the computers really get used for in our kids classrooms and you start wondering who is really benefiting from them being in there... hint, not the students, think big business.
If I could convince a parent, teacher, principal, or school board to buy OLPC computers with the added benefit of outfitting a student, class, school, or school board in the developing world at the same time... FANTASTIC! Partners in a global community. Where do I sign up?
Summary is rather hyperbolic (Score:5, Informative)
Er, no, the BBC is not reporting that. From TFA (emphasis added):
So, rewriting the first sentence of the summary to be accurate: "The BBC is reporting that the OLPC might be available to the public, either next year or later, and if so that it might be on a buy-2-get-1 basis, and eBay might be involved in some way."
Re:Is this a deal? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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The only thing I'm worried about is some jackass phucking this up for everyone by trying to...well, you know where I'm going with this.
Still, this is a cool idea. I can buy two sets of these knowing that two kids somewhere in the world are going to have laptops, keep one for myself a
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Just set the "Anonymous Modifier" as -6 and you will likely never see another AC post.
Set it to -2 and browse at 0 and you will only see them if they get modded up decently and you browse at 0 (I assume you do, as you see his post, set it at -3 if you browse at -1).
not to hard is it?
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Re:cool (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Then you can buy it for $300 (Score:5, Funny)
Judging from all the email I get asking me to help move millions of dollars out of Africa, I think Africans have enough computers. I think they need more financial advisors to help them move that money.
Parent
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Re:Insensitive Clod (Score:2)
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