I'm inclined to think this is a really good thing. I am sort of confused about how they plan to get the internet to rural areas, they addressed it somewhat, but seemed to sort of skim over it.
The objections raised seem to be a little empty. I'm also curious if there are more substantial objections than those the New York Times printed.
What do you think of this? Will it help? Or is it just pressing first world solutions on third world problems?
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SOme of the innovations the article describes sound like things we should have been doing for school kids in the U.S. as well. We have this fascination with advancing our computing capabilities all the time, because the companies are continually trying to expand and keep ahead of the competition. What's interesting to me is that this approach limits the consumer end aspect of the technology requirements, and makes the computers portals to a more controllable system. I've always thought people would have FAR less confusion and frustration with technology if this were done more often.
For instance, my parent's digital cable box has been the same for 5 years, but the capabilities they've added make it completely different from the one they originally received. Today, we buy laptops to connect to the internet or work various programs that have been around for years and haven't changed much- yet those programs demand NEW computers and updates all the time. It's like that even with television now- you need the NEW set to get the good programing, as if the programing depended upon technology to make it better (which it isn't, usually).
I do understand the desire to advance, but some of that desire is simply driven by aggressive marketing and consumer manipulation for profit. Personally, I'd like to know why I've owned laptops for about 5 years, and yet all the ones I've ever used had a battery life of less than or up to 4 hours. Couldn't companies put off "advances" in the other power hungry aspects of the computers and focus on giving me a machine that lasts, and doesn't wear out in 2 years? Software companies and manufacturers always seem to be barelling ahead with NEW stuff, and not really fixing things and tightening up the corners along the way. Things do get worked out, but advances often eliminate a technology before it can be perfected, only to replace it with something equally unreliable (but shinier!)
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Orincoro: most of the laptop companies aren't spending a lot of money advancing anything. They're purchasing commodity components to assemble their machines, and the chips and such they put in them are generally cheaper than previous generation chips due to currently being produced in mass numbers.
Indeed, there's currently a bit of a plateau in processor speed in consumer laptops due to various tradeoffs and reaching speeds that are finally good enough for most people doing most things computers are currently capable of that they want to do.
As to why they aren't meeting what you consider important needs, I think you already know the answer: those needs are judged less important in comparison to other things by many people.
However, I think you'll find that lots of laptops currently on the market last easily more than two years. Mac laptops routinely survive longer, and I know that's true in other brands as well. The most common hardware failure in the long term is almost certainly the hard drive, and that's replaceable (usually with one that's larger and cheaper).
edit: and lots of laptops have battery lives longer than four hours, and have for years. Have you done research into battery life before purchasing your laptops?
posted
As I've posted before... Excluding video-gaming and video-downloading, the $100Laptop's "limited functionality" is more than the overwhelming supermajority of home computer buyers will ever use on their machines. Microsoft's BillGates and Intel's PaulOrtinelli went out of their way to attack MITMediaLab's $100Laptop -- including the proposed software -- because they fear that a commercial model of the $100Laptop would pose a serious competitive threat to their business model: using planned pseudo"obsolescence" via ever faster chips to run ever slower bigger&uglier software to con people into throwing out perfectly good machines&software so that they'll buy newer models. I mean, good grief, whining about the lack of a hard-drive and a video player as serious objections? A 20Gigabyte portable hard-drive can be purchased for less than $90, and a portable Dvd-read&write is less than $70: which comes to less than $260 for a laptop with hard-drive and Dvd player.
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There's still a ton of work left to do before something like will make a big difference in most of Africa. Southeast Asia and South America I can see an impact.
But with half the world living on a dollar a day, isn't a $150 laptop, with an increased electric bill built in, still asking too much from the third world?
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: There's still a ton of work left to do before something like will make a big difference in most of Africa. Southeast Asia and South America I can see an impact.
But with half the world living on a dollar a day, isn't a $150 laptop, with an increased electric bill built in, still asking too much from the third world?
Countries will be buying the laptops, and they will be distributed to school children for free. Furthermore, the batteries can be recharged by means of a foot pedal, if electricity isn't an option.
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Why do I have a feeling these will be mostly paid for via loans from first world nations. So we're creating cheapish laptops, funding their purchase and handing them out to children.
Do all these kids know how to read and write? What language do they speak? What websites will they visit in the languages they speak? What learning tools will the laptops come with and have there been any studies done to make sure they can more or less "teach themselves?" How sure are we that they are actually going to be using these things and that they won't sell them for food? or drugs? or medicine? Giving a computer to a poverty stricken family is like handing them a check, I think they're shortsighted enough, or desparate enough to sell the damned thing fast as possible for food money.
It sounds like a good idea that is ripe for disastrous application. It's probably going to cost millions alone just to bring wi-fi to many of these areas. I think shoving a laptop into the hands of poor kids ignores a lot of the other problems they have that should really be solved first, that won't be solved with a laptop alone.
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I heard somewhere (great source, I know) that there would be a plastic shield over the keyboard that only children's hands would fit under. I also heard (from the same forgotten source) that they've done studies showing that kids can figure out the basics of computers (ie, how to get online or to open programs or whatever) crazy quickly even without having seen/done it before. Again, I don't know how reliable this information is since I can't even remember where I heard it, but there you go.
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"...isn't a $150 laptop, with an increased electric bill built in, still asking too much from the third world?"
Hence the foot-pumped (originally planned to be handcranked) battery charger. No electrical grid needed, and no electric bill.
Thing is, it takes very little to make a BIG difference. eg: Solar-cells have become cheap enough that in remote locations they are the far less expensive alternative to setting up the kilometres of electricity lines from a centralized powerplant to a village. Because solar-cells are relatively cheap, cellphone relay towers can be set up in remote locations. Because at least one someone is wealthy enough to purchase a (recycled FirstWorld throwaway) $20cellphone, the villagers can buy phone-time from the owner. Because a villager can use a cellphone to find out how much produce/etc is selling for in the nearest market town, s/he has the information needed to strike a better sales price to the middleman, who formerly could make "take it or leave it" offers. Or decide that the extra profit potential makes it worthwhile to walk the produce/etc to the market town herself. When one someone in the village can afford eg a moped, s/he can provide direct competition to that (formerly one&only) middleman.
Ya see, poor people are natural entrepeneurs. Unlike FirstWorlders, they live too close to the edge to not take up any opportunity afforded them: UNICEF/etc puts in a solar-cell panel, next thing ya know the village gets wired for electricity. Not much per person, but a FirstWorlder can't even comprehend how much having a single electric lightbulb in ones home matters. With a cellphone tower nearby, one someone becomes rich enough to buy heavier wiring from the solar-cell panel and a cheap television set. Now you've got a village theatre, and news sources. With more knowlege of what is going on outside of their own little circle, people begin demanding better from themselves and fairer treatment from their society and government.
ThirdWorld WiFi&computers are another means of achieving that end. Formal education is a secondary benefit being used as the main selling point to make an endrun around the folks who profit from "liking things just as they are" and want to keep it that way.
posted
Probably a rejected proposal to solve the problem of adults ripping off kids to sell their $100Laptops on the blackmarket. Not really a problem: when every kid has a $100Laptop, the market for sales to families is already saturated. Oh sure, some individual adults will want one of their own, but so what? As long as $100Laptops aren't allowed to be exported out of the country they were stolen in, only a relatively few extra $100Laptops need to be imported. Poor adults becoming computer literate, even if through the blackmarket, is just another plus.
That "self-taught computer literacy" is from a series of experiments conducted in several slums near tech centers and several remote villages in India.
posted
BTW: The godfather of all hackers, JohnBrunner, made the "free wireless laptop as a means to lift the ThirdWorld out of poverty" proposal in a scifi short story published way back in 1975.
Despite people having made hundreds of billions of dollars turning his ideas into reality, Brunner died in poverty. Everything he had previously made as an author was lost paying off his dying wife's medical bills.
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Bumping this up because I edited in the correct link to "self-taught computer literacy" up above.
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Saw that article today, folks in the comp sci department round here have been talking about it for a while now. A lot of the folks who are involved with it are the open source crowd and news tends to travel.
I think its a good idea. I dunno how much good it'll do, but I can't see it doing harm.
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That article is impressive, thanks for sharing. I'd support funding for more studies, and broader studies (more locations around the world).
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Well, OSC invented interactive, AI based computer games... no wait, that was a collective effort based on market demands, rather than a movement begun by a solitary visionary. The world's a small place, and yet somehow this basic idea got thought up by alot of different people over the years.
Brunner wrote that story in 1975? I'm sure HE must have read Asimov's stories about computers that work to solve the world's problems, (and are held in the palms of each person's hand), so really that idea is just a rip-off of Asimov, and it was all HIS idea... oh no wait, it was just a long series of uninterestingly small advances in thought, with no focal point. Ho-hum.
But no, no, they were HIS ideas. He owned them.
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posted
Video games were on the market well before Ender'sGame, as well as terminals connecting to the Internet's predecessor. VirtualReality gaming was dreamt*up by CliffordSimak as the reason why Man had disappeared from the face of the Earth (except for one small family) in City, a fixup novel published in 1952 combining short stories originally published in the '40s. None of Asimov's computers or robots had anything more than a golem fantasy element to them.
Brunner accepted an expenses-paid invitation to XeroxPARC in the early '70s to share ideas. And a round-trip flight between Britain and California wasn't cheap back then.
* Edited to replace 'invented' with 'dreamt up'. Orincoro's objection below is correct: invention is a LOT more work than inspiration.
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Yah, and Douglas Adams invented Wikipedia. Makes sense to me.
Perhaps your assessment of Brunner is affected by the availability heuristic- you've heard of him, and you've read more about him, therefore he is the most important person in this field. It's a bit like people on this board starting to think that everything comes from an OSC novel- when of course hundreds of authors write about similar themes, and some have been even more influential.
Actually here's a better explanation: I believed for a long time in my childhood that my family had invented a lot of common phrases in American English, because I ONLY ever heard those phrases spoken by my sisters and parents. Of course they were the people to whom I talked most, so I heard them repeat things I had never heard, therefore I associated the phrases with them. It happens all the time, you get into a topic and read into it, and you find to your shock and awe that your assumptions about it (and conclusions) aren't new or even a little new, and that in fact many smart people were interested in the topic before you were born, or before you jumped on board. It's extremely humbling- but interesting.
Edit: calling something a Golem says nothing about what that object does, what its function is in the story, or anything like that. I don't see how that's relevant, or how it disproves the point about "who thought it up first." I'm saying something inherently safe to say: it isn't as simple as you think.
edit again: When you toss out statements about concepts being "invented" by someone, you tread on thin critical ice. I took a sci-fi literature course a while ago, and it was a running joke in the class that every author bio in every book we read, and every short story we reviewed said that the author was the Grandfather, the inventor, the standard, or the original sci-fi writer or innovator of some more specific genre. Every single famous author in sci-fi was conferred that distinction, and we spent a week reading nothing but stories and excerpts that are claimed as "the first" sci-fi, or "the first" hard sci-fi, or the first computer sci-fi, or whatever. There are so many "firsts" because sci-fi is an genre based on innovation; just because an author hints at a world containing an all powerful computer (for example) doesn't mean HE invented it, when another author makes that computer the center of an entire story, and adds a good deal of his own creative ideas. They are ALL inventors, and they are all innovators if they are any good at all. I guarantee, absolutely, that you could make a case for an earlier book or an earlier author being the "first" hint or example of any literary convention in sci-fi, or any other genre. Asimov is derivative of x-y-z, and OSC is derivative of Asimov plus X and Z but not Y, but also some people Asimov never read... and on and on. The center doesn't hold.
posted
Instead of giving absurd analogies, try reading what Brunner wrote between Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Nope, still don't buy it. I read the website, and I'm sure his writing is very good, but I am afraid I am not going to buy the idea that he invented anything. The article goes as far as to say that he was working with a popular genre of near-future distopias; in other words, recreating a well established story.
edit: Ha, see my example is right there in this very article: "The book by which John Brunner is best remembered is "The Shockwave Rider", published in 1975. It's often called the first cyberpunk novel, and deservedly so. " I've read the same thing about more than one author, so as far as I'm concerned, nobody gets credit. It's a stupid argument to try to make anyway.
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The website was just to whet your curiosity. eg While real world engineers were in the process of getting ComputerAidedDesign off the ground enough to start replacing draftsmen, Brunner's protagonist in Jagged Orbit was using a searchengine/bot to trawl the Net to provide data for photorealistic ComputerGraphicImaging and audio-realistic voice-synthesis to create video content for his muckraking news program.
Finding folks who espouse "CreationScience" doesn't make evolution less true.
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Talk about absurd analogies- why are you talking about evolution? But even if you DO go down that road, you're basically arguing that you can prove something like "X came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection," whether you think it was Darwin or one of his contemporaries, when OF COURSE it was a process that involved more than one person.
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For those interested, one of the One Laptop Per Child (the people doing this initiative) bigwigs will be giving a keynote at PyCon. I think the keynotes will be recorded and available online, too.
I was at PyCon last year, its a wonderful programming conference. Its also one of the most affordable, being run by the community. That also helps it be friendly and relaxed. If you have interest in the Python programming language, even if you're a complete beginner (there are agenda items for people of all skill levels), and are interested in attending a conference next spring (work or school conferenece budget?), PyCon is a good way to spend your money, and a good way not to spend too much of it.
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