Birmingham (Ala.) eyes $200 laptops

[Doctor Cynic]

Source: AP

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - If $200 laptop computers are good for kids in Peru and Mongolia, why not Alabama?

Birmingham's City Council has approved a $3.5 million plan to provide schoolchildren with 15,000 computers produced by the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child Foundation, which aims to spread laptops to poor children in developing countries.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080305/ap_on_hi_te/city_cheap_laptops_4

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Try to skip down to the second to last paragraph. That's where the ugly stuff is.

[Donnachaidh]

1. this smells like someone made a backroom deal and is trying to push it through

They DON'T have the wireless technology in the schools to utilize the laptops, and they don't have the techs to teach the teachers how to use them? Soooo, the point of buying them is WHAT?

Uhhh, somebody better start taking a real good look at the PO's from day one. I smell a scam in the making.

[Kutjara]

4. They don't have a lot of system administrators in...

...African villages either. Or WiFi networks, for that matter. The XO was made to work out of the box and be simple to operate in places without modern infrastructure or technical knowhow. The built-in wireless feature is primarily there to allow the computers to connect to each other, not the Net, enabling collaborative working, messaging, and gaming between the students in a single class.

The OLPC program is not a scam. Nobody is making any money out of a machine that sells for about as much as it costs to make.

[steven88]

2. They can get the software from Neil Bush. n/t

[Kutjara]

3. The XO is a great little machine.

Last year, the OLPC organization ran a "give one, get one" promotion where people could buy two of the machines, one of which would go to a needy child, while the donor got the other one. There was so much demand among geeks and gadget freaks, the offer was extended twice.

The article is a bit ignorant on a number of points. Leaving aside the stereotypical "African bush" comment (cantcha hear them jungle drums beatin' now?), the fact the XO runs Linux instead of Windows is a good thing. Open Source software is cool and there are thousands of great free applications made for it. Also, the XO is not really intended to access the Net wirelessly. The built-in wireless is meant to allow a number of XOs to network together, allowing kids to work collaboratively, send messages to eachother, and play multiplayer games.

I'm glad some needy kids will be getting access to these machines, despite the ignorance of at least one legislator.

[sandnsea]

5. Why not email the district?

And explain the use of the machine and that all that's needed are some teachers with a minimum of computer skills, which I'm sure most teachers have. I'd hate for the district to pass this up over a misunderstanding.

[Kutjara]

6. I'm doing that right now.

There's enough misinformation going around about the OLPC program as it is without adding more fuel to the fire.

The whole point of the XO is that it can be used in remote environments that have no infrastructure (not even electricity - the battery can be charged with a hand-crank) and no access to IT skills. The OLPC team pretty much thought of everything. I participated in the "give one, get one" program" and had a few months to play around with an XO. I finally donated it back to OLPC, but I seriously considered hanging onto it; it was a great little machine. The lucky kids who get one of these will have a terrific learning tool.

[SoCalDem]

13. I participated in that program.. Bought one..gave one..

It's so darned cute.. still in the box..since i really don't need it..but someday I'll probably have a grandkid to give it to :)

Total cost $423.00 for both.. one for me..and one for a poor kid somewhere in the world.. and a $200 tax deduction :)

[alfredo]

7. I wonder what NCLB has done to their schools? They seem to fit

the profile of what NCLB was designed to punish.

[ingac70]

8. Alabama..

was already near the bottom any way.

[alfredo]

9. If the schools don't do well in the tests, they lose funding. I'm sure there

are private schools willing to take the kids with money, and leave the poor in crumbling schools.

[customerserviceguy]

10. I remember when pocket calculators were $75-100

and that was in 1974 money. Ten years from now, laptop computers will be in the $20 range as cheaper screens, keyboards, and processors become available. Maybe five.

These $200 laptops and the bloated personnel infrastructure put in place to "administer" them will soon look like a colossal boondoggle.

[merwin]

12. bloated personnel infrustructure required to "administer" them???

These things are meant to go to African villages that have NO personnel infrastructure. Can't get much simpler than these machines.

[customerserviceguy]

15. There's nothing so simple

that an educational bureaucracy can't make complicated. Go back to the article, which talks about technology workers to train teachers and students. They'll also spend megabucks on a wireless system that anybody could find the parts for at the local Radio Shack.

As I recall, nobody supplied us with calculators back in the 1970's, we just waited until the price dropped enough for everybody to afford their own. Soon most urban and suburban areas will have wireless infrastructure in place as a public good, making the contemplated intra-school-only IT network superfluous.

In short, this thing seems to have decision makers who are peckerwoods who have no concept of computers, networks, or wireless, who can be completely bamboozled by so-called 'experts'.

[Kutjara]

14. Sure, let's just wait another decade before we give...

...needy kids the tools they need to learn how to complete when they grow up. What's another generation of lost children? Let's just wait around until computers are cheap as chips, then we'll put our hands in our pockets, prise out a $20 bill (with Jackson blinking in the light) and buy one or two. Or maybe wait another decade until they're $2. Yeah, that's an even better idea. Hell, if we wait 100 years, we can get all the computers we need for free!!!

Actually, Moore's law and the accelerating rate of technical change will mean that computers in 10 years will cost (in real terms) about the same as they do today. They'll just be about 1000x faster, unless you put Windows on them.

As for the XO, it requires no "bloated infrastructure" and is meant to be used by people who have never seen a computer before. It is specifically designed to be used in areas with no electricity and no comms.

[customerserviceguy]

16. I know that the XO's are simple

but in traditional top-down thinking, this city's decision makers think they need to waste educational dollars on IT administrators, soon-to-be-obsoleted networks, and so-called "technology workers" to train the teachers.

They should just hand out the computers, and let the kids educate the teachers on how to use them!

As for computers costing the same tomorrow as they do today, well, that $75-100 calculator I bought back in 1974 can be had at a dollar store today, and it still does just basic arithmetic. We're at a point now where humans cannot enter and digest information faster than computers can input and output said data. Speed is no longer the limitation it was ten years ago.

[Kutjara]

18. Unfortunately, bureaucrats are all about the top-down thinking.

They'd no more put XOs in the hands of kids without a raft of legislation, a 500 page manual, and a whole "safe surfing" "cover your ass" liability avoidance infrastructure, than they would underspend their budgets or limit themselves to a two hour lunch. That's the main reason the XO will be great for developing nations, where kids will be allowed to use the machines, and here, where kids are wrapped in cotton wool like precious eggs, while lawyers decide how we should all live.

I see your point about calculators, but they are very much single application devices (even the fancy scientific and financial ones). All you can do with them is manipulate numbers and read them on a tiny screen. General purpose computers, on the other hand, have an infinite range of applications. Any single-application product is inevitably going to become commoditized, because there are only so many ways you can do just one thing. If software developers keep coming up with ways of using all the horsepower of new PCs, however, people will continue to plunk down the cash for the latest and greatest hardware. It's not just about people not being able to process huge amounts of information, it's about computers becoming fast enough and software becoming sophisticated enough to do much of the processing themselves, so that their output becomes a limited range of optimized choices (knowledge rather than data). OK, ok, it's a pipedream and such systems are a long way off (except in a few specialized areas), but my point is that today's most sophisticated applications are toys compared to what can be created. We're building Model-Ts compared to the Mercedes S-Classes our children will be constructing. I think there's still a long way to go before general purpose computing becomes commoditized to the same extent as pocket calculators.

This all presumes that no disruptive shift will occur, of course. If we're all suddenly computing on a cloud of ubiquitous nanoparticles that float around the earth in a huge cloud, all bets are off.

Of course, I could be talking crap. I recently read that Sony is worried about Asus' Eee PC causing a "flight to the bottom" among consumers, increasing demand for cheap PCs at the expense of fast, shiny, expensive ones (like most of Sony's overpriced Vaio range). It could be that we're seeing the beginning of the phenomenon you're talking about. If people decide they don't want photorealistic videogames, full-immersion VR, real time animation rendering, or whatever new whizz-bang application is coming down the pike next, there really is no reason to spend $5,000 on some firebreathing Alienware laptop or $17,000 on a fully-specced Mac Pro.

The next few years will determine which of us is right. Neither, I suspect. ;)

[madrchsod]

11. good idea

they are a great little computer. what is great about them is that they are open source thus kids do not have to rely on microshit and can develop their own programs.

[cap]

17. I dont see why poor children in the US are charged more than 3rd world

children. Those computers sell for much more than $200 in the US.