Changes at OLPC

There is extra stuff in there that costs more money.

Part of that extra stuff is the shock protection for the interior. You don't want capacitors falling off the board surface, for example. Cheap stuff does this by covering everything in epoxy but that makes it effectively unservicable. I don't actually know what the Panasonic Toughbook does for this problem.

There is also a fancy shock cushion for the hard drive or replacing the drive with an SSD. Either option costs more than standard.

Two things that justify extra markup is rarity and testing.

Because there is some increased cost associated with toughness, fewer customers will buy the product so the price must be even higher to compensate for fewer sales. Those customers that will buy it are looking for tough durability specifically and so the price may be higher because its a hard to find quality.

Testing for toughness means even more destructive tests on samples. I doubt you see Sony dropping many Vaio laptops onto concrete floors. But if toughness is one of your primary selling points, you will want to make sure your product is staying tough by testing a few out of every thousand.

OT: Wrt to food problem, the problem is not world productivity, it is agriculture subventions which allows US and EU to control food for a big part of the planet, and causes misery by preventing primary economy development. Fighting false ideas is very important for human development, that's why i insist so heavily on this, sorry :-)

I was refering to the OLPC propaganda:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMeX2D4AOjM
"connected so the child can access the internet" 42s-44s of the video.

This is unrealistic in Africa, which is nearly half of the developping countries.

The OLPC team of 60/32 people is probably more important than the team of Nepad working on ICT and education.
This is also one identified problem of development: foreign NGOs have more power than local governments (at least in Africa), and they do what they want, no matter if it is asked for, or at least adequate.

I can tell you: they don't care about high-tech for children, they just want normal (preferably low power) computers for universites and schools, they can tune and repair easily, like we do with ordinary exchangable components. And they need to part-time work as cyber-center, to cover the expenses (mainly teachers, power and bandwidth cost)

There are many very sad examples of great ideas leading to complete failure due to ignorance, eg contraception (translated as "barrier to children" which is opposite to culture whereas a local term "spacing sorgho plants" would have been perfectly understood and accepted http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2009/01/08/l-aide-a...), agriculture (new food people don't eat, or which require very long cooking time so the energy budget explodes), in water management (destabilise the local economy balance and create international tension, or deep drill that fall apart after 2 years and force people to manually get water from 40m when before it was 10m) ... This only due to, let's say, the certitude of being Right, when one has only a very superficial knowledge of the situation.

Child education is very culture-dependant. So, we (highly tech developped people), can maybe provide technology expertise, or share university courses, but for child's education the content must be done by local people, or for sure it will be inadequate.

Let's say olpc had some great ideas, partly suitable, but went wrong, and need to travel in Africa to learn.

On laptop.org, in press:
"# 2008-01-07
One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million in 2007"

for 100 000 xo, for rwanda, cambodia ...

I doubt that Rwanda wanted laptop for childs, but of course they accepted them when they came. It is just misused resources that fit no need, but the sponsors are satisfied, so why complain ?

35 million$ is 5% of rwanda budget !

Reread my rant against powerful foreign NGO that do unwanted things. I just hope they will take the olpc and put them where there will be more useful.

such documentation is good for opensource developers as well.

as far as adding hardware cost, the claim I've seen is that the SD card slot was added for this purpose, but from what I've heard the extent of that hardware change was altering the plastic and adding a socket that was wired to existing chips. hardly a make-or-break item.

and for now the SD card slot is necessary to run many linux distros as well (including Fedora), so it's existence is good for opensource as well.

the biggest hardware change from the initial specs was the change from 128M to 256M of ram, and that wasn't done for microsoft, it was done because firefox became too bloated to run acceptably with the smaller memory. that change cost a _lot_ more than the SD card slot.

I can think of a commercial Debian derivative that was hideously late in launching because of factors like this. "[A] huge problem with management was moving goalposts and featuritis, because if they didn't have feature X right away they weren't going to be able to close the deal with [hypothetical target market]*."

We went back and forth repeatedly, suffering identity crises over whether we were targeting "the enterprise" (because big, high-margin contracts are where the money is), or "grandma" (because high-volume, low-margin retail sales are where the money is). We slipped horrendously. I don't remember now but I'm pretty sure it was over 6 months.

Ultimately, while the product did finally ship and actually got good reviews, we captured neither market, laid off two-thirds of the staff, and fundamentally changed the business model of the company.

* While our founder was by no means an unknown figure, when one's brother formerly oversaw right-wing death squads in Honduras, one likely commands a degree of attention from, and shares a common language with, officials in third-world countries who can get things done.