> Cheap and widely available computing devices can do a lot to raise literacy and technical skill across the world.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but what I'm criticizing is the idea that a bunch of pie-in-the-sky academics are going to come up with a better solution than tens of millions of people working in parallel.
The OLPC programs was INSANE. First, there's lots of power in the third world - a hand crank is a crazy idea and makes it look like a toy while adding mechanical complexity. Next, instead of using cheap commodity hardware it designed things from the ground up. Did you know that they were so adamant against using the round wheel that they decided to reinvent it? Ah, excuse me. Not wheel. Firmware. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d04
The OLPC programs was INSANE. First, there's lots of power in the third world - a hand crank is a crazy idea and makes it look like a toy while adding mechanical complexity.
Well, the hand-crank didn't work out, and they admitted that.
I disagree though that there is a lot of power in the third world. Looked at from an absolute cost as well as a relative-to-income cost, electricity is quite expensive for a large percentage of the world's population. Just look at Pakistan, for example. [1] Its much worse in other parts of the world. A lot of the slums surrounding major cities don't officially exist, so they don't officially get basic services (water, sewage, power) either.
So the OLPC project, rather than rely on cheap off-the-shelf hardware, tried to radically reduce power consumption for the people living effectively off the grid.
They were also concerned about the lack of wired/wireless communications infrastructure in these areas. So that drove the push for wireless peer-to-peer networking, and the need for the networking to run even while the rest of the board is powered down. And that drives a radically different board design, and thereby the BIOS too.
These days, it is feasible to accomplish many of their same goals with tablets, and that's what they've been working on. There was no significant low-power computer market back in 2007 to draw upon. Now there is.
If these third world countries all had decent mobile data infrastructure (at least 2G), and everybody could at least afford a phone or something to access the Internet, then the OLPC project wouldn't be needed. That definitely was not the case in 2007, and is still not the case in 2012 for many parts of the world.
+1. I think cheap commodity hardware and pirated software revolutionized third world more than the fancy OLPC project.
I'm not trying to justify piracy here, but in many cases the academics fail to understand the requirements of developing countries.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but what I'm criticizing is the idea that a bunch of pie-in-the-sky academics are going to come up with a better solution than tens of millions of people working in parallel.
The OLPC programs was INSANE. First, there's lots of power in the third world - a hand crank is a crazy idea and makes it look like a toy while adding mechanical complexity. Next, instead of using cheap commodity hardware it designed things from the ground up. Did you know that they were so adamant against using the round wheel that they decided to reinvent it? Ah, excuse me. Not wheel. Firmware. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d04
<shakes head>
Craziness all the way down.