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David Pogue Reviews the XO Laptop
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Oct 04, 2007 03:22 PM
from the little-engine-that-could dept.
from the little-engine-that-could dept.
Maximum Prophet writes "David Pogue, technology reviewer at the New York Times, has taken a first-hand look at the XO laptop, also known as the 'One Laptop Per Child' project, or the '$100 Laptop'. His reaction is very favorable, having tested it out via several criteria. And ultimately, he writes, the laptop is about more than just technology for the people. 'The biggest obstacle to the XO's success is not technology -- it's already a wonder -- but fear. Overseas ministers of education fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than computers. But the XO deserves to overcome those fears. Despite all the obstacles and doubters, O.L.P.C. has come up with a laptop that's tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open, flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different teaching and learning styles.'"
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I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In fact I can think of a method right now to help ILLITERATE people become literate.
But your right, these are for kids that do have a certain level of literacy.
Don't assume they'll be just be used for good (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't assume they'll be just be used for good (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are you advocating that we should just cut them loose entirely? embargo the entire continent until they've managed to pull themselves up to the first world standard, just in case any aid we give them backfires on us? (yes, I am well aware that I am exaggerating for the sake of dramatics).
Parent
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We shouldn't go into this with rose-colored glasses, with blind idealism.
Yes, but projects like this are driven by idealism in the first place. I suppose there are differences between practical and blind idealism, but while it is important to note the possible pitfalls, it is also equally important not to lose sight of the ideal.
I hope this is not sounding evangelical already, but I believe the OLPC team (both administrative and technical sides) have considered most if not all the possible eventualities this project may encounter and decided to go ahead with it anyway.
So t
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And most of the people in these countries would prefer that rich white people stopped poisoning their environment.
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This machine has a high likelihood (if coupled with an internet connection, and that is being developed alongside the XO, IIRC) of creating blogs of starving villages. These WILL get noticed, and WILL receive charitable donations whether solicited or not from bleeding hearts. ('bleeding hearts' not meant derisively)
Put another way, I think there's a really good chance that these laptops will actually end up feeding people, very possibly more
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I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through...
(I think I'll just bite my tongue on the porn issue for the moment)
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I love it when people take initiative to do what they think is the right thing, and then the people sitting on the sidelines are like, "Oh, you're doing it all wrong, you should do absolutely nothing like me." It really makes l
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I've done volunteer work in 3rd world nations and the one thing we really needed was realiable, weather-proof computers with wireless communication. The first thing I thought of when I played around with an OLPC was how great the platform was for remote areas. In these environments, the standard practice is to get hand-me-down laptops from 1st world countries. These tend to vary from barely working 386-ba
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No, that's just a bunch of shills/trolls who realise this thing's good enough to make people in the developed world wonder why they're paying so much for the bloated, virus-infested crap they're saddled with.
When you see whining on the scale of the posts here, about a project with so many clear benefits, scrape a bit deeper and you'll see the usual greed and self-interest driving them.
Re:Don't assume they'll be just be used for good (Score:4, Funny)
It could be worse. They could be using MySpace.
Parent
Yo, Editors: (Score:3, Informative)
Of course there's fear. (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question becomes, then, how afraid are you? Innovation always involves fear. But it involves ridiculous rewards when you're right.
When you consider that the course of action in question involves the betterment of an entire generation of children, and quite possibly their children as well, you can't be faulted for at least trying something new. Even something untested, because face it, your old and busted way isn't working very well.
Re: Of course there's fear. (Score:5, Insightful)
It could be like a quantum leap for an entire generation of kids. They might take it to the next level. Punch it up a notch. Fly high. Other metaphors and similes.
Parent
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
THEY WILL LOOSE THE SALE... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Can I flash the thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe they should even sell a proper commercial OLPC (in black perhaps) to consumers expressly for this purpose. Use the profits to subsidize the educational version.
Re:Can I flash the thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad comparison. Is you Compaq designed to take all sorts of abuse, and be able to withstand water and dust and such? How long does your Compaq run on battery? Does it have no moving parts other than the keyboard? Or is it rather fragile.
This is not designed to compete in the regular laptop market, but if they upped the keyboard to adult size it would probably work for 90+% of US citizen's real needs.
Parent
Re:Can I flash the thing (Score:5, Informative)
- 6-24 hours(!!!) of run-time
- The XO's battery is good for 2000 charges and costs $10
- The XO has a 200 DPI daylight visible screen(!!!)
- It can run on a 1' square, $12 solar panel
- Spill-proof keyboard
Just like the article says, this laptop has many significant advantages - not just over your $350 Compaq, but over my $3000 Thinkpad. I would really like to get one of these for my 9 year old - and I have no doubt my wife and probably myself would be stealing it often!Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
- the screen is readable in daylight
- the battery lasts 24 hours in "ebook reading" mode (they power the framebuffer only, while suspending the main board)
Is there another product on the market that does this? If you reply "paper" I will smack you with a fish!
The other neat point is, it hasn't even been designed for first-world grownups to read on the beach.
Photoshop? (Score:5, Informative)
In all seriousness, though, the OLPC comes with OpenOffice and Gimp, which seem like fine alternatives to me for a bunch of African kids getting the laptop for free.
Steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market (Score:2, Insightful)
It sounds like they may be defining a new marketspace that others will be free to join and compete in.
If OLPC was so good, it would be sold in US (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that the OLPCs are not offered in US toy stores even before pushing them abroad makes me suspect that they are seriously underpowered machines without much available software and are not as fun and cool as the project leaders would have us think.
Re:If OLPC was so good, it would be sold in US (Score:5, Insightful)
That's flat out moronic. It's an amazing machine.
So why not sell them in the US?
These are ingenious little machines. It would be very smart to sell them to US consumers, but frankly I think the US computer market (something that includes me) tends to be... on average... far too ignorant to be able to buy these effectively. They will consider them all broken because they aren't "normal" computers.
All this is ignoring the fact the whole point of this project is to help 3rd world people, not give Americans another way to IM their friends.
They aren't underpowered, they have plenty of power. You don't NEED a dual CPU 2.x GHz laptop with 2 gigs of RAM to compute. This think would kick my Mac LC II around the block so bad it wouldn't be funny.
Parent
Sell them as (Score:4, Informative)
Once the kids friends realize how much power they will have, they all will want one. By the time the parents realize what's up it will be to late.
Parent
Re:If OLPC was so good, it would be sold in US (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't designed as toys. They are designed as educational tools to be used in an environment where they interact with others with similar hardware, school servers, etc., and to support centralized distribution of software and content by the agency purchasing them.
I also don't think you understand the marketing costs and risk associated with a mass retail marketing effort, particular of a product which is designed for the specific needs of a very different one than you are trying to market it to at retail.
Parent
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I'ld like to add that they need to produce millions of near identical computers to get the economy of scale to produce it at $150-200 cost.
I'll add that it would help if the laptops were produced in the country if not the region that buys them. One nation mentioned as buying or having an interest in buying the XO is Brazil. If OLPC were to open a factory in Brazil to build them n ot only would it benefit education in Brazil but it would create jobs there too. They might not last long but the skills ga
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I don't think "the U.S. market" is the thing that it is not designed for that makes the big difference. Sure, sure, its environment-proof in many ways to meet needs of the developing world, but that kind of kid-proofing isn't far from the needs o
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Cheers.
A child?? I must have turn the logo the wrong way (Score:5, Funny)
90 degrees in which direction? If you turn it the other way it looks like a skull and crossbones.
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tradeoffs (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite some of my reservations (some of them in common with Pogue) I really hope that this "little laptop that could" becomes widely adopted. If it is, it will be game changing on so many levels. It is so much more than a teaching tool. Not only will it redefine who gets to participate in the market of ideas, it will change the pricing for laptop prices across the board. Perhaps even quicken the convergence between cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other media centers. The little device is just wicked cool.
However, there are some darker sides to it. Online addiction [bbc.co.uk] is epidemic in China. Also, if the OLPC is actually successful, some suggest that their owners would man a CAPTCHA solving army [olpcnews.com].
In the end, I think these risks are worth the benefits. And wide adoption is the least of the project's worries. It seems as if adoption is taking off a little too slowly.
Less is More? (Score:3, Insightful)
More and more, after years of Windows, then a Mac, then dabbling with various Linux distros, I find myself questioning just how much of the junk on my computers is essential or even useful.
Less moving parts, simpler and fewer applications, and limited capabilities, all sound like positives, not negatives, if only because it could slow the endless stream of updates and fixes, each of which seems to introduce other problems.
I can see an OLPC machine as really good daily machine for e-mail, browsing, and some everyday tasks like word processing, at least with a bigger hard drive. With the option of maintaining a desktop PC, even a generation older, to handle the heavy lifting of Adobe and similar tools, I could probably get by nicely with this little unit.
It's called the "Web", guys (Score:5, Insightful)
'Cause there's no way that you could possibly use one of these things to learn about sustainable agriculture [wikipedia.org], malaria prevention [cdc.gov], or safe drinking water [who.int], right?
120 Euro laptop? (Score:3, Funny)
Give 1, Get 1 - Great but Dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
There will be plenty of takers for the foreseeable future. The program caters to peoples vanity, allowing the giver to flaunt their generosity. Nothing appeals more to the western world than gadgets and vanity, and if our obsessions can fuel third world education, then that would be the best thing since sliced bread.
Governments could also benefits from a relatively low-cost rugged PC. Try to get a reasonably equipped, rugged piece of hardware for $400. You can't.
However, the laptops for sale should be of a different colour, for instance red. This would alleviate one of the biggest concerns of the program --- that stolen green laptops became a major source of revenue to corrupt government officials, or to parents who found a few dollars more tempting than their child's education. The goods will eventually end up in the hand of westerners who act like Santa Claus but are actually stealing from the kids --- a disturbing thought.
Selling the standard green laptop is a gigantic mistake. By all means keep the production line the same, but please change (at least) the colour of the enclosure for the resale variant. Help keep the green XO in the hands of its intended users.
I'll be Buying and USING the XO (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be picking up at least one of these machines -- well, two, since if I buy one for $400, they send another one to a kid somewhere who needs it.
I hope the distribution isn't limited to third-world countries; there are some poor areas right here in the U.S. that could use these machines. Certain Indian reservations come to mind...
I need a computer with decent outdoor screen and great battery life, one that's cheap enough I can afford to let it sink into a swamp without diving in and fighting the alligators and leeches for it (I do wildlife research in Florida). This machine may be just the ticket.
Re:first tits! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:first tits! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:first tits! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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Prudishness is an american problem. And here viewing pr0n can be argued to have educational value more important than math.
Re:What "need" does this fulfill? (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe it was Duke Ellington who, when asked what Jazz is, famously said, "Man, if you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know."
(And while we're at it: You are aware that the majority of the developing world is not in Africa, I hope?)
If you don't get why improved access to information is a fundamental prerequisite for development, then the XO will always look like wings on a fish. If, however, you can accept the premise that inadequate communications is one of the biggest stumbling blocks we face when trying to perform any kind of development work, then you will quickly see why people are so excited about this project.
I met a young doctor yesterday whose initial reaction was almost exactly the same as yours. She's dedicated to health education in the developing world, and she's very good at what she does. When she first read about the work we've been doing in the South Pacific, she immediately scoffed and insisted that we should try getting a steady supply of antibiotics and anti-malarials first. But just last week as she was conducting a walking tour of one of the poorest areas in the country, she realised what she could achieve if most or all of the children there had these laptops. She's since signed on to our national OLPC project as a content developer.
Solving communications is a necessary - but not sufficient - element of development. The XO doesn't remove the need for vast amounts of material aid, but it makes it so much easier for development projects to actually succeed.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Most dedicated eBook readers are bigger than a hardcover, far too big to slip into your pocket. And my Clie has at least the same resolution as the good eBook readers I've seen, it just has a smaller screen... about half the size of a page of a paperback.
IMO, most PDA's don't make good e-Book readers.
IMO, most eBook readers don't make as good eBook readers as PDAs do. Being able to fit into my pocket is for me a non-