LWN: Comments on "Changes at OLPC"

Better than OLPC

Alterego — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:28:35 +0000

Yes, that's it. It seems simple and do the right things.
It just lack a local wikipedia and tldp.org mirror ;-)
Thanks for the link, i'll to get in and contribute.

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

forthy — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:41:41 +0000

IMHO this is silly. What's causing damage to Africa is the kleptocracy that's the dominant government form there. A country will get nowhere with a dictator who wants to stay in power even when the population dies due to the effort. You certainly will hear a lot of excuses that the help provided by outsiders is hurting the people.

If you look at other parts of the world, things go quite differently. Asia has developed very significantly during the last decades. There are still poor countries, there are still many countries where the political system is not up to western standards, but at least the dictators are benevolent. They don't kill their own people, like they did in the 60s and 70s.

However, I think the originator of this subthread is right: You should not concentrate on the small children first; if you only have a limited amount of founding, take the students first. The benefit there is higher. It raises the education of the elite, and whatever you think about equal democracy, it's always the elite who sets the direction of a country. When they are stupid, uneducated, and selfish, they will ruin it.

One problem of third world countries is the quality of teachers. Negroponte want to "solve" that problem by skipping the teacher. I don't think you can. By helping the students first, you can create sufficiently good teachers, and it does not really take that long. By the time the OLPC really is a billion unit product, you'll already could have a few million capable teachers.

University = starting point of knowledge transmission

Alterego — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:49:04 +0000

I agree mostly, except for where we can help.

Approximately 1 billion people in Africa, half of whom are under 25 yo, that represents 500 million people.

Lets say 250 million under 12 yo.
Do you think it is possible to send 250 million xo ? I don't.
That's worth $50 billions of hardware (not to speak of other costs).
Can _we_ (foreigners) send/help enought teachers for 250 million children ? no.

So 250 million child, lets say 25 million bachelor, 2.5 million at university.
1 machine for 10 students, that's 250 000 machines in several hundreds universities. This is possible now. (the number are certainly wrong, but not that much)

And from these universities, _they_ (developping countries) will "produce" their teachers/programmers/biologists/doctors/... which in turn will create their educational content, and educate the whole continent.

We can help in universities, because math are math, and there the teaching languages are spanish/english/french/... so we can directly share our educational content and tools. This is not the case for early education, which is very cultural dependant,

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Alterego — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:33:57 +0000

s/subvention/subsidy/ in my posts (and s/subsidy/zero/g in US and EU :-)
The control is exerted by subsidies to the richest countries ! (cotton...)

Agreed.
And one good news is: the number of child per family decreases when people gets richer.

http://graphs.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;...

Nicholas?

branden — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 05:24:12 +0000

No, mainly because I wasn't on that team, but the distro one.

Oddly enough, something useful did come out of that work. The "nullfs" kernel module later became part of a customer's proprietary backup solution.

When I look back on my years there, the failures I see were primarily not technological in nature. I don't know if that's good fortune, or an experience most software developers have. I've seen some ugly, ugly code, more of it proprietary than free.

Even dpkg is better described as "self-consciously eccentric" than "ugly".

~"Home of the very small"

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:46:35 +0000

http://www.case-toupetit.sn/Pages/Case_tout_petit_english...

olpc become a Trojan in education.

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:31:11 +0000

dlang wrote:
>> you disagree with the target of the machines.
>> feel free to disagree, but recognize that others thing that there is far more value in teaching all the kids a bit rather then concentrating on the universities where you only get the ones who have already gotten out of the worst areas (or they wouldn't be in the universities)

Education for all, yes. Computer for all no.

You totally ignore socio-economy reality in Africa.
Roughly half the people are under 25 yo. 50% are analphabet.

A rather well doing country, Senegal, spend ~40% of its budget for Education.
They are concerned with computers for children education (they said that "IT-ignorant people are the 3rd millinenium analphabet"), but their efficient solution, is to have IT center in "home of the very smalls" (approximate translation for the very young children first kind of school), maybe one desktop for 30-100 children, not one laptop for each, which would be totally dumb, inefficient and expensive.
Don't forget the setup, running and maintenance costs: you must also count the energy price, the time (which is money) to teach to the teachers, and the huge logistical problem to transport 1 million of useless olpc when "only" 30 000 standard desktop would have done the trick.

>> non-standard hardware
>> what you don't recognize is that all laptops are non-standard, as are most of the brand-name desktops and servers. in all these cases you need parts from the manufacturer to fix the machine (or another machine for pieces)
Its very easy to remove one broken component from a Dell and replace it by a Toshiba one, and hopefuly they already know how to do it, and they take care of their machines and still have running pentium with 32 MB and 40 MB HD and a wired intranet if any.

The huge disadvantage of having only one non-standard model, is that statisticaly one piece will break before others and will determine the lifetime, and you will not be able to fix it. With various ordinary components, this is very unlikely to happen, the global lifetime (or MTBF) will be much better.

>> unknown software
>> while I am not a fan of Sugar (far from it, look at my posts)
ok
>> Sugar is open is linux under the covers and nowdays you can run several other linux distros on the machines (and the ease and ability to run the other distros is improving rapidly)
How many Sugar teacher do we have, to teach enough developers how to do their own suitable application ?
Oh good idea, to make a fork of olpc software and run a custom olpc with beta buggy debian-experimental or fedora-11 half baked olpc support !!!

>> it's also defiantly true that much of the money and time that went to OLPC would not have gone to other charities
I agree.

>> closed system now
Reread olpc-ms partnership http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/4d/XP-on-XO.doc , they speak of "affordable content" not "free-content", and "the benefits of technology", not "benefits of education".

And there are very true concerns with the knowledge they aquire:
page 2: "Windows support on the XO device means [...] They will also develop marketable technology skills, which can lead to jobs"
What ? Sugar won't create jobs opportunities ? Standard Linux would have done the trick too, but MS skillful propaganda gots in, and the misguided olpc is becoming a MS plateform.

OLPC seems to have done some quite good job until now.
I still see OLPC as being wrong, misguided and the best MS trojan for Intellectual Property, DRM and non free content.

My hope is that XO2 + XP will be too expensive compared with other standard linux solutions, and that the knowledge and community acquired with XO1 will go back toward standard linux way.

Nicholas?

Ze — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:09:32 +0000

>>The stuff AMD reportedly did to them seems pretty raw.
What did AMD reportedly do to them?

Money and help ?

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:37:49 +0000

>> anything that claims to be _THE_ plan for a continent is suspicious to start with

Are you a troll ?
Did you check Nepad site, at least the home page and the url i gave wrt IT ?

They are poor, but certainly not stupid nor ignorant.

Better than OLPC

dlang — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:17:14 +0000

this question came up a lot last year as the machines hit mass production. I was at a presentation by Mary Lou Jespin to techies (the USENIX conference) and the question was asked there.

the answer is that the crank ended up being fragile, and not that efficiant, so what they did was to make the laptop _extremely_ forgiving on it's input power (something like 7-30v tolerance and charging best on 9-15v), so it can get power from very dirty sources.

the other thing is that a person cranking can produce more power than a single battery can efficiently absorb, so the emphasis shifted to charging several batteries at once, and produce a large number of different chargers.

they have string pull chargers (think lawnmower)
bow chargers (think old western fire starter moving the bow back and forth)
solar chargers
as well as many other charger designs (wind, water, animal power, etc)

as far as the screen goes, my understanding is that it's cheaper to produce than normal LCD screens (it has 1/3 the pixels of a conventional screen of the same nominal pixel count while having ~3/2 the effective resolution in color mode), it should hit the market in other devices Q1 or Q2 of 2009

Money and help ?

Ze — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:11:24 +0000

>>I commend you for taking the time out of your life to go in on the ground and work to make things better, but telling people that if they don't do that they are better off doing nothing won't make anything better.

What if it's the truth? Is making yourself feel better more important than helping them? The simple fact is until people accept that aid programs have a cost on the developing country and that not all aid is helpful they will continue to be unsuccessful in the long term. (BTW this can also be applied to social services.)

My personal view when it comes to charity is that I don't donate anything (time,money,goods) unless I know where it is going. It's a philosophy I intend to follow for the rest of my life. I'd love to push some of the responsibility off onto others but mountain of historical evidence tells us that it's far too easy for aid to be wasted , or harm them. I've mainly donated time and skills , and goods that aren't needed to charity so far because I've chosen a different path than most but I'm facing the situation where I could become reasonably wealthy from my own hard work and a bit of luck , so it's something I've thought about a lot. In the long term finding out that my help was harmful even though it had the best intentions would more than counteract the temporary joy from doing it. I'd feel responsible for the harm even though it was unintended (and I would be responsible for it). So looking to the long term and taking a careful involved approach is really a win/win for everybody including me.

There are many reasons why aid fails but a lot of it has to do with exploiting the countries for resources and labour. In the long run I suspect we would be better not to exploit these countries AND give them education through information and helping them construct things using basic skills. We can shorten the time to bring them up to our technological level by showing them some of the mistakes on the way up and letting them chart a better path.

If we exploit these countries we aren't helping them and we aren't letting them choose the way they want to be ,often we are supporting a Govt that the people don't want or that isn't sustainable just so we can get what we want.

It's also no use teaching them how to build or use something if they can't replicate and maintain it themselves. There are numerous times in history when we've donated technology only for it to be useless in a couple of years when the program ends because they can't maintain it (or it's too costly to maintain it). If we give them aid in the form of goods to supplement a short term shortfall we have to be careful we don't wipe out their existing industry or make them dependent on it.

Money and help ?

dlang — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 04:08:21 +0000

anything that claims to be _THE_ plan for a continent is suspicious to start with. and just because it wasn't in that plan (whenever it was drafted), doesn't mean that it's not a useful idea.

you need to investigate how OLPC is working, not just read the press reports from NN's speaches. there is heavy involvement from people in-country, they are working with and through the ministry of education (or equivalent), they aren't just drop shipping laptops to schools and declaring success

Better than OLPC

Ze — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:37:09 +0000

You've got me there.

So I went to see exactly what they were shipping and the lack of wind up power was the only thing different to what I expected.

IMHO that's a killer for a lot of markets where power isn't available all the time. That to me was one of the killer features of

it , when you combined that with a mesh network , you can end up with quite a nice distribution model for new areas without a permanent net connection , by piggybacking on the part of the population is mobile in different areas and different radii. A good distribution model like that is important if it's supposed to meet it's educational goals.

I think Mary Lou has the right idea with the screen , if they can reduce the cost of that by mass production and popularising it in the general mobile market ie tablet pcs,netbooks,mobile phones,etc. Then the chances for long term success of a cheap education tool become much better.

Money and help ?

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:10:21 +0000

When "they" is a OLPC leader, should we blindly accept what is said, don't ask to watch their budget, and trust their wonderfull success story ?

OLPC is now tackling sub-saharian problems.
But it seems they have not even read a 3 page document describing _THE_ official continental plan for Africa. (NEPAD.)
http://www.nepad.org/2005/files/documents/30.pdf

Does olpc fit Nepad Objectives ? No.
I cannot explain better why i say OLPC is (now) severely misguided.

Its hard to explain in small (and emotional) posts what i learnt in several years of travels, discussions, experiences and many books readings.

Maybe google will give you some hints for nepad, gapminder, Jean Ziegler work at UN, and "right for food" (refused only by one country in the world, i let you find out which one), or Joseph Stiglitz, or digg and you will find lots of dramatic total failures, or misleading projects.

If you want a sad real story where it would have been infinitely better to do nothing than impose our rules (but it was supposed to help them, it had nothing to do with our business of course), read this :
http://aithne.net/index.php?e=news&id=201&lang=0

And please, keep on trying to help other people, that's great. But get deep informations, and don't misunderstand my criticism. It's necessary and good to have criticism in order to improve.

IT can provoke big civilisation disasters, by erasing culture, that's why it is important that we (foreigners) provide only help for tech, and that the local people create the socio-cultural-educational content.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

dlang — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:19:22 +0000

if you think that I consider the OLPC project perfect then you have missed my very heated criticism about them. I defiantly do not consider them perfect or anything close to it.

however, I do think that they are doing good things, and doing it in ways that are mostly orthogonal to other efforts underway.

saying that there are starving children so we should not give ones that aren't starving assistance is like the kid being told to eat his peas because there are starving children in china and the kid saying 'fine, send them my peas' the conclusion doesn't follow from the problem.

as I said earlier, it's not a zero sum game.

I disagree that knowledge must begin in the university. I think that starting from the bottom will help more people, and will end up generating higher average levels of learning faster than starting at the top.

earlier in this thread the argument was made that OLPC was junk because most kids leave school around age 10 and will never see computers again in their lives. If this is the case, where do these university students come from?

even in the US the percentage of people who have gone to college is relatively low, if you wait until that point you will miss most people.

I do know people on the ground in developing countries, and while they sometimes question the efficiency of this or that project, I don't see them arguing that the projects should be scrapped, I see them trying to take advantage of the benefits of those projects and to counter the failings.

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

BrucePerens — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:19:11 +0000

We're getting pretty far from the topic of laptops for children. But before you pin the problem on agriculture "subventions" - which I guess means control exerted through capitalism on the production and distribution of food - you should also consider the Malthusian aspect. The major governors of population throughout history, and no doubt before, have been famine and disease. Even with the most efficient possible production and allocation of food, eventually the population would reach a point at which all would be hungry, if illness wasn't killing us off. I can't believe we could be very far from that point today. The only long-term solution would be for human beings to limit their own procreation to a level at which the ecosystem can sustainably feed us.

Bruce

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:50:02 +0000

my post was unclear sorry.
I meant that OLPC fund rising for 2007 is equivalent to 5% of the budget of Rwanda !
And if we count $200 x 500 000 unit = $1 billion, the whole olpc budget is greater than Rwanda budget. (did you read what i wrote about powerful but ignorant foreigners NGOs ?)

Of course any as-poor-as rwanda country will accept some thousands of brand new laptop. The sad side of the story is that there, universities lacks computers, and all all these laptop would have been much more usefull to the country at the university than in the hand of 6-12 yo child !

And it seems obvious to me that knwoledge transmission must begin at university, then naturally flows downward in schools, as _their_ university also produce _their_ teachers.

Your attitude that OLPC must be *perfect* is doing a huge disservice...

Do you know people on the ground in some developing countries... ? I do, i m just telling what they explained to me, frankly, without any hope that i would come with $millions.

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:25:26 +0000

I agree that educating the not so poor will later help the poorest.

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 :-)

Better than OLPC

dlang — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:59:26 +0000

given that the OLPC does not have a crank on it (and therefor no wind up power source) this post shows that you don't know what the origization is actually doing and shipping (as opposed to what they thought would be possible and practical several years ago)

Better than OLPC

Ze — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:51:02 +0000

>>prior to the XO the small format laptops were the most expensive laptops available. they had the highest performance components that could be squeezed into them.
There were other netbooks/UMPC/whatever you want to call them this year before.The Apple eMate 300 based on the newton comes to mind.

The reason why we are seeing a plethora of netbooks now isn't because of the OLPC but rather because the price of components has come down to an affordable level and they have an acceptable amount of power. We are doing a great disservice to the OLPC project by crediting them with something they aren't responsible for , hiding the real gems they've been responsible for.

>>when the XO was being designed it was being ridiculed as being too limited and too slow to be any good. as it neared full production other companies jumped on board.

Yet they chose faster processors and they aren't choosing the OLPC's screen,wind up power source, or durable casing. IMHO those are the gems of the OLPC. The casing isn't new but the screen and wind up power source are novel.

Money and help ?

dlang — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:33:45 +0000

when you say 'do what they ask for an nothing more' who is 'they'

if it's the government, then frequently all they want you to do is to give them money to spend on luxuries.

in every case where OLPC is doing a deployment, someone in the receiving country has asked them to do so.

I commend you for taking the time out of your life to go in on the ground and work to make things better, but telling people that if they don't do that they are better off doing nothing won't make anything better.

Countries obligations to MS ?

dlang — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:28:57 +0000

you disagree with the target of the machines.
feel free to disagree, but recognize that others thing that there is far more value in teaching all the kids a bit rather then concentrating on the universities where you only get the ones who have already gotten out of the worst areas (or they wouldn't be in the universities)

non-standard hardware
what you don't recognize is that all laptops are non-standard, as are most of the brand-name desktops and servers. in all these cases you need parts from the manufacturer to fix the machine (or another machine for pieces)

OLPC has elected to send the pieces in the form of complete working systems rather than in separate boxes for each part. there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach (parts inventories are harder to do, you end up with more of some parts than you need, but it takes _far_ less space and you know that all the parts work)

unknown software
while I am not a fan of Sugar (far from it, look at my posts) Sugar is open is linux under the covers and nowdays you can run several other linux distros on the machines (and the ease and ability to run the other distros is improving rapidly)

doing things not asked for by the countries
this applies to every charity organization in history. Every single one has their own agenda and approach to the problems (and in many cases different definitions of what the problems are)

using huge resources
charity work is not a zero-sum game. while it is defiantly true that some of the money that went to OLPC would have gone to other charities, it's also defiantly true that much of the money and time that went to OLPC would not have gone to other charities

closed system now
I am not seeing a close system. I see cases where it could have gone that way, and the reaction from everyone except some PR people (and especially the reaction from the people actually making things work) gives me no reason to believe your doomsday scenerio

I do acknowledge that some of the early deployments are going to have windows on them, but I don't see it that OLPC is pushing windows, I see it as a failure of Sugar being ready. the good news is that software is replaceable. it has improved significantly in the last year, and will improve more going forward. every system shipped with windows can be converted to linux in the future at no cost (the labor of doing the switch is about the same as the labor of doing an upgrade to windows)

I may be a wild-eyed optimist, but I am accused of being a naysayer and cynic far more frequently.

Money and help ?

Alterego — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:16:34 +0000

You transform what i said into ridiculous things.

Did i ever asked for or speak of money ?
Man, i spent 3 years of my life, and nearly all my economies in western Africa for IT in small ngo and schools. I did it on my own money because it was too time consuming and difficult to get the small funds i needed, without going througth insanely dumb sponsorship, who wanted things to be done in sponsors way, when it is needed to do them in african way.

But as you speak of money, one other problem of aid to developing countries is that the funds quickly goes back to the original donators country, and only very little is spent in local economy. OLPC is a huge example : the paid developpers are in US, the hardware manufacturer in developped countries. The target country can only say "thanks, you are so kind", when it would have prefered to have local developpers doing the job. In OLPC it seems some parts are localised, so i guess there have been paid translators.
You should ask your beloved olpc team how the money was spent, i missed it on their site too.

The main things i try to share is:
- from here we understand nearly nothing, so we do bs and think we are right.
- The good way to help them is to do what they ask for. Nothing more, nothing less.

Countries obligations to MS ?

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:42:31 +0000

We disagree. You think olpc has done great things, i agree to some point.
Maybe i should sumarise wrong points.
- the targeted audience
- non standard hardware, impossible to fix without another xo for pieces.
- unknown software (who knows sugar in the world ? no one except olpc fans)
- doing things not asked for by the countries
- using huge resources (for their jobs) that could be much better used if they asked what is wanted by developping countries, instead of doing what they, rich westerners, think is good. (as i'm biased, i say its is good for their ego and US jobs, not for children education)

Did you read the olpc page concerning MS partnership ?
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/4/4d/XP-on-XO.doc

this is the biggest blunder:
- closed system now. I bet you MS XO will be widely provided soon, and if we don't take care non-free content with DRM will follow, of course with royalties...

You underestimate MS power in developping country, it is really a very solid wall that has already broke many efforts, and cost a lot to the poorest countries.

I'll try to re-find MS contract with Burkina Faso and will send it to our beloved editor. You will see that this is only business, it has nothing to do with education or children, its only a matter of controling the market.
OLPC was doing great to escape from this. Too bad they change their mind and became a trojan for IP and closed source and DRM in education.

Countries obligations to MS ?

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:04:39 +0000

the OS for the XO laptops (and XS servers) is linux, not XP. XP can be installed on the laptops.

if a country decides to sign a deal with microsoft they should know what they are getting into.

OLPC didn't force them to use windows

the 'olpc - microsoft partnership' consisted of OLPC giving microsoft people a couple of desks in the OLPC office for a few months, so that they would have access to the engineers to ask questions so that the microsoft people could get XP running on the XO laptop.

OLPC is shipping linux, not XP on the laptops (unless the customer, the country that is buying them, specifies otherwise and provides the software to load)

are you saying that if the countries inform OLPC that they will install windows on them that OLPC should refuse to sell them the machines?

countries bandwitdh and internet access

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:58:18 +0000

are you saying that all $35M came from Rwanda? and only got them 100,000 laptops?

they probably spent ~$200,000 or so on the 100,000 laptops for Rwanda (probably a bit more to account for infrastructure pieces)

the $35M is probably the entire budget for OLPC for the year (and in 2007 they were not distributing many laptops, they only hit mass production in october 2007)

where is your evidence that the laptops that were sent there have been misappropriated? if they didn't want them they wouldn't have spent the effort to work with the OLPC organization to get them, train teachers, and distribute them.

OLPC doesn't just load a crate with laptops, put them on the boat/plane and then declare success. a deployment team works on-site, with the teachers and watches that the laptops are being distributed to the kids. they also continue to watch after that, if for no other reason that they are looking for success stories to post, but also to help worth through problems.

your attitude that OLPC must be evil is doing a huge disservice to the people with the OLPC project that are on the ground in the countries working to make things succeed.

Countries obligations to MS ?

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:56:02 +0000

Partnership with MS for dual boot with Windows XP.

Afaik, xp is an OS and is not open-source.

Also worth of interest, what are the countries obligations wrt Microsoft when they have xp powered XO ?

I read the contract, oops, the partnership between Burkina Faso and Microsoft, signed in the beginning of October 2004 in Ouagadougou, and valid for 5 years if i remember correctly. It is said to be a public document, but i don't know how to get it again. Maybe ask to MS-africa ?

One very clear point of the text was: now the country is aware of MS Intellectual Property and License cost, MS is allowed to estimate the number of infringing machines in the country, and the Burkina Faso will pay the due to MS.

Thats a nice gift !

In France we have a proverb saying "the road to hell is paved with goodwills". I think thats a good description of olpc current direction.

countries bandwitdh and internet access

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:20:50 +0000

Nice to learn this. I did not this on laptop.org. I'd be glad to have an url, ideally which explains the funding of the infrastructure too, and how OLPC fits a pre existing demand from the country.

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.

Changes at OLPC

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:13:57 +0000

so you are saying that trying to assist anyone with technology or education is worse than doing nothing.

all we should do is provide you (and people like you) with money, we aren't even qualified to evaluate if the money is being spent efficiantly.

A million digital books

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:07:51 +0000

where are you reading that the OS is not open source?

there is a difference between the OS, the applications that run on that OS, and the documents that you use those applications to read

the OS that's been deployed is open source (like any other purchasers, countries can load other operating systems on the devices after they buy them)

the documents that are provided are all provided under licenses that allow for free distribution, but not all documents are distributed under licenses that allow them to be modified.

in my opinion this is not a bad thing. not all documents should be modified. One particular case that I think of is the Internet RFC documents. they can be freely distributed, annotated, etc, but you cannot modify the document. I see this as a good thing. standards (and reference) documents being distributed unmodified is good.

having other things that can be modified is also good, but don't confuse the two.

Changes at OLPC

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:16:40 +0000

For first-aid, if you don't _really_ know what to do, the only thing to do is :
- try to avoid the worsening of the situation by signaling the accident
- call competent services to get help
- stay with the victim and speak with her while rescue is coming

A positive approach, is then to learn "first-aid" during a stage at hospital, or with firemen... and forgot all the nasty things that incompetent neighbours told to you.

A million digital books

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:58:52 +0000

You are right. I am biased about this. Its said that all content is CC 2.5 license.

But previously, OS was open source, why did this change ?
And i have difficulties to imagine Microsoft sponsoring free to copy content.

A million digital books

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:51:14 +0000

you are reading this in such a way that a million copies of one book would satisfy the goal, I read it in such a way that it would require at least one copy each of one million different titles.

also, why do you assume that they will be DRM to prevent copy, etc? nothing that OLPC has written or deployed is done this way, why would they change?

countries bandwidth and internet access

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:44:30 +0000

the OLPC 'perfect deployment' is very similar to your #2

the laptops use the mech networking to talk to the school server, which is the proxy to whatever Internet connection there is, and also has a large store of content on it's local drive.

OLPC is deploying these systems out in the wild, they are working with people who are setting up point-to-point wifi connections over several miles to bring connectivity to the schools. they are _very_ aware of what the bandwidth limitations are.

XO is a laptop for children 6-12 years old

dlang — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:18:34 +0000

when OLPC deploys laptops to a country they give one to every kid in grade school.

in a few years we will see what happens when those kids leave grade school.

it may be that they give the laptops back, but do the schools really want 5-year old laptops to issue to new students? (which would be 10 years old when those kids leave school), or will they get new laptops for the new students and let the kids keep the old machines.

If the kids keep the machines they will continue to use them after they leave school.

just becouse 1B people are starving, that doesn't mean that educating the next 2B people who aren't starving.

and who knows, possibly by educating those 2B people the overall productivity of the world will go up and more food will be available to feed the 1B

Changes at OLPC

tzafrir — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 17:32:49 +0000

We can't solve all of their problems. So let's not even try to help them.

Nicholas?

csigler — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:34:32 +0000

"... moving goalposts and featuritis...."

FWIW, in the business sector (and esp. IT) in the U.S., this frequently encountered problem is jokingly (and dyslexically :) referred to as:

"Feeping Creaturitis"

countries bandwidth and internet access

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:06:59 +0000

True, mesh networking is a really good idea, maybe a short term low cost solution of using a wire/wifi would have been enought ?

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.

A million digital books

Alterego — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:39:35 +0000

Our technology initiatives will focus on:
....
3. A million digital books

with DRM to prevent copy, in partnership with editors ?
If they are free to copy, why count them ?

countries bandwidth and internet access

BrucePerens — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:29:21 +0000

OLPC's concept of net access is mesh networking, more than connection to the global backbone. Kids can network to teacher's laptop. Teacher can get materals by sneakernet.