OLPC and Romania
The Romanian Parliament debate the OLPC program and the current tendency is to reject it. I find suggestive this quote from one of the most vocal opponents (source: HotNews.ro, translation mine):
"On the IT market, beside this manufacturer (OLPC), there are two worldwide companies, Intel and AMD, who produce more powerful mini-laptops"
I know the saying "Never attribute to malevolence what you can explain by simple stupidity", but Varujan Pambuccian, the author of this quote, is a former computer programmer, with an impressive background in IT&C.
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Yes there are more powerful computers out there for a much higher price and much larger power footprint, can't be used outdoors and don't have the collaborative features we are building. If one tries to define the project as a laptop project then it is easy to argue against. When one takes in the project as a whole and realizes it is an education project then they start to see the benefits.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but not when that one is a politician following whatever interests he has to support.
ReplyDeleteToo bad it is only in the Romanian language, but this video say it all - politicians doing what they know.
ReplyDeleteThat dude is right when he says there are better alternatives, right now OLPC is very sucky. Over the time it's price rose considerably. Anyway AMD is planning to realease it's cheap laptop soon, as is Quanta, Intel with Classmante and Asus with EEE-something (i like the asus ;)).
ReplyDeleteAs usual, people don't really get the OLPC project: it is not about putting cheap hardware in the hands of children everywhere. That can be done very efficiently by random Chinese and Korean companies (and in fact it is done every day).
ReplyDeleteThe core of the project was to provide an education model, complete with content and -let's say it- a pedagogy. One may think that OLPC is a stupid thing, and that in fact children are better served by e.g. dumb terminals and a faster central server, or by cellphones running Java... but the pedagogy benchmark is what OLPC should be assessed on.
I do not see anything educational in the OLPC. It is a really stupid thing to run a single-user single-tasking almost non-functional OS on hardware that can run quite a serious Linux version like Puppy, Antix, Slitaz for example.
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