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Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)
The folks over at One Laptop Per Child News have information on this year's edition of the Give One Get One program. For $399, one can get an XO for some lucky child as well as donate one to a child in the developing world. This year, Amazon is handling the fulfillment which will hopefully alleviate many of the problems seen last year. Interested people should visit Amazon's XO site.
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Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 17, 2008 23:38 UTC (Mon) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
Some context. Among other things, I find it amusing how much the finance
people get compared to the educational people. Remember, people, the person pulling the puppetstrings on this empire is the one who invoked Free Software to generate community buzz, then jettisoned it as a core principle once the sleeping bear was awakened and started dangling various inducements.
There's a quasi wiki discussion of both sides at:
Salaries reported on the IRS form 990 of the OLPC Association for 2006:
$233,333 Mark Foster VP Engineering (since departed)
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 17, 2008 23:43 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
and your point is?
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 18, 2008 10:15 UTC (Tue) by Ze (subscriber, #54182) [Link]
I'm guessing that something supposed to be a charity case , it's unsightly for people to be profiting off it.
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 18, 2008 18:55 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
welcome to the real world. people need to make a living, even when working at a non-profit.
some of the salaries listed are substantially lower then those people could make at commercial companies.
you would need to look closely at their entire financial statement, but I believe that they have two sets of cash flow, one for building and deploying the laptops, and one to run the organization (keep in mind that the laptop portion had no income until late last year, they had other income to run things prior to that)
the thing to look for in a non-profit is how much of the money they get does useful stuff (as opposed to paying for the overhead and salaries of the non-profit) for many non-profits this can be as bad as 30% of the total, a non-profit that gets this to the 70-90% range is considered extremely efficiant.
if OLPC distributed 500K laptops in the last year at a overall cost of $200 each (between the manufacturing and distributing costs) that would be a budget of 100M. the salaries listed are ~1% of this total, they have other costs (servers, travel, etc), but this is not looking bad at all.
the overhead of having Amazon deal with the orders for this years G1G1 program will probably be a larger chunk of cash than it takes to run the OLPC organization for the rest of the year.
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 18, 2008 4:08 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]
It looks to me like the highest paid individual was the veep of engineering.
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 18, 2008 10:49 UTC (Tue) by pterjan (subscriber, #48447) [Link]
Actually no, the highest one seems to be Robert Fadel with 2x$122,333 :)
The only line which seems very surprising is the low salary of the Director of Education compared to all others
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 17, 2008 23:59 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I got two last year and have been tinkering with them off and on.
my take on them
I'm _very_ happy with the hardware, however the software still needs improvement
it's significantly better than it was a year ago, but still has a long ways to go.
the good news is that it's also relativly easy to put a 'standard' distro on these nowdays, they have very few things that are not upstream
with no power management (still the default, and the only option up until a few weeks ago), the battery lasts 3ish hours. however if you enable all the power saving options (enable sleep, turn off wifi, turn off the backlight) and use it as a reader you can get very good life out of it (I used it to follow a training pdf last week and after 8 hours it still had half it's battery left)
my personal opinion on the windows vs linux issue of some of the deployments is that while microsoft doesn't have clean hands the linux software was also not very good at the time the decisions needed to be made.
so get one, try the Sugar interface, put normal distros on it, and work to make it better (if only by making normal distros work well on it and shaming them into fixing up Sugar ;-)
I'm seriously considering getting 4 more this year.
Old model, same price Posted Nov 18, 2008 0:43 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] As far as I understand, it's still the same model as the last year. It's not the shiny XO-2 model with a touchscreen instead of the keyboard. And the price is the same as the last year. In the meantime, other laptops are cheaper now than they were a year ago. The target price of $100 is not a penny closer, yet we have a stronger dollar now.I'd rather donate some money directly to those in need than to a failing company.
Old model, same price Posted Nov 18, 2008 1:53 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
of course it's the same model as last year. That's the only model that exists.
the XO-2 hasn't even reached prototype status (it's not expected until 2010)
as for the price, remember that this includes the overhead of selling in single-unit quantities, the $100 each was based on country-sized quantities (minimum 50,000 or so). A year ago they were saying that the manufacturing cost was running ~$180 each. it's probably dropped a bit, but I haven't heard a recent figure, but even if it's dropped fairly substantially $200 each is still a small markup
and how did you get to calling OLPC a 'failing company'? Yes it's true that they didn't ship 5m laptops their first year as they had been dreaming, but they shipped a lot (probably over 1m, I believe they sold ~400,000 just to Peru)
they haven't done everything right my any stretch of the imagination (see my other post for some criticism, but that's a long way from them being a 'failing company'
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 18, 2008 3:53 UTC (Tue) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]
I'm putting it one my Christmas Wishlist for someone to give one of these to me. Both my 7-year-old and my 4-year-old already have one, but I don't want to keep borrowing theirs and using up their precious space by installing developer tools on it. :-)
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 18, 2008 8:44 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
contact the olpc developer program, if you can convince them that you will do development on it they will give you one free.
Europe consists of UK only? Posted Nov 18, 2008 10:36 UTC (Tue) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622) [Link]
Well, I went to the Amazon to check how to order one for my kids. But the UK website claims to deliver only in the UK. Suppose I live elsewhere in Europe, does anyone know where I should look?
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 19, 2008 0:55 UTC (Wed) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
If I understand the site correctly they charge 50 pounds for shipping. That seems a bit steep for such a small machine?
Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) Posted Nov 30, 2008 17:11 UTC (Sun) by duck (guest, #4444) [Link]
For me that is the reason _not_ to buy one. But it is 50 £ per shipping,
so maybe if I find three other persons who would order a two...
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